If your business receives too many chargebacks, aside from losing valuable, you can potentially damage your standing with the processing bank. If the chargebacks continue, you may even lose your merchant account and face difficulties finding another service provider.

Here are some tips on how to avoid chargebacks altogether:

Loyalty programs are everywhere you look. At the airport, gas stations, grocery stores and coffee shops, every retailers seems to be offering some perk to its frequent customers. More and more business are recognizing the value of these programs in retaining existing customers. Why? Because it’s a cost effective and a vital component of maintaining a competitive edge in today’s marketplace.

Data shows that it costs business 5-10 times more to acquire new customers than sell to existing ones. Additionally, existing customers spend an average of 67 percent more than new customers.

Consumers have also come to expect loyalty programs, especially from larger retailers. Good rewards programs are wildly successful; they can be the reason that a customer always flies with Jetblue, or purchases all their cosmetics from Sephora.

Most business owners have dozens of passwords for various websites, software and services. With over 30,000 web sites hacked per day hackers are now cracking passwords faster than you can process a payment.

The challenge is, how do you develop a strong password for each site without having to remember them?

One solution would be to use a secure password generator and store their passwords in a password manager. The problem with this is that it’s a hassle to constantly be looking up passwords.

We want to share with you a simple technique that will keep your passwords at the top of your mind.

How? By creating an algorithm.

Phishing is when fraudsters pretending to be from well-known companies, organizations, or government agencies contact consumers and try to trick them into revealing their personal information.

That information is then used to commit fraud like opening new accounts in your name or taking over existing accounts like online banking or iTunes. It can happen over the phone, on email or even through text messages. Protect yourself with these quick tips:

According to PCI standards, a merchant may never store lists with customer’s card data on any medium which is not PCI compliant. Word documents and spreadsheets, even if they have a strong password, are not PCI compliant, and thus may never be used to store lists with card info. Even if you create a custom program with many levels of security, it is still not PCI compliant.
(The exception to this regulation would be to store the info of one card on a piece of paper. However, multiple numbers are never allowed, even on paper)

If a merchant processing bank fee or charge is ever returned for insufficient funds, the processing bank will become concerned. Their reasoning will be that if the merchant doesn’t have coverage for a small fee, how would they be able to recover from a large potential chargeback?

When a customer sees a charge from a merchant they don’t recognize, there is a good chance that they will dispute the card.

For some merchants, the name that appears on customer’s statements is not the name that they operate with (a DBA) or print on receipts. When this occurs, it is important to communicate with customers and let them know which name to expect on their statements.