I woke up this morning to find a Sunday-morning email that read:
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CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION has initiated a $297 USD dispute.
A $297 USD payment for Desert Kite is being disputed by CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION because your customer says they didn’t initiate this purchase (this is known as a fraudulent transaction).”
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In other words, somebody bought my Most Valuable Email course a few days ago.
And now somebody — either the person who bought, or the actual credit card owner in case in case they had their credit card details fleeced — was contesting the charge.
I shrugged my shoulders and clicked to archive the email and get it out of my sight.
I had had something like this happen once already, back in September. Somebody bought my Copy Riddles course. A week later, I got the same Capital One chargeback notice, saying that the credit card owner wants to contest the charge.
Back in September, I went to check the account on my site associated with this purchase. I saw that they had logged in, gone through all the 40+ pages of the course in quick order, and now were claiming they had nothing to do with it.
I submitted whatever proof I could gather to contest the chargeback, and to show that this was a legitimate order, and that all the pages of my course were accessed. It probably took a half hour to an hour of my life.
Still, a few weeks later I got a notice that the chargeback had gone through anyhow. There’s no appeal process and that decision is final.
So the reason I shrugged my shoulders today is not that I accept that chargebacks are simply a part of doing business online, but rather that I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about it.
And if there’s nothing I can do, I don’t want to give it any more time out or emotion out of my day.
Except of course, I remembered that I do have the wonderful resource of this email list.
So not only can I get a daily email out of this event, but maybe I can even learn something from you, either to deal with the current chargeback request or to prevent others like it coming up in future.
So if you have any info for me, hit reply, and write away. I’ll be grateful to you.