Check your coverage

Send us your processor and rough monthly volume. We will confirm which of your MIDs the networks can cover, and what it costs, before anything is switched on.

We reply within one business day.

Prevention Alerts

Hear about it while it is still a question.

A chargeback starts as a phone call to the bank. Verifi and Ethoca pass that call to us within minutes, which gives you 24 to 72 hours to settle it. Do that and the chargeback is never filed at all.

  • Both alert networks in one feed, not two logins
  • Auto-refund below a threshold you set yourself
  • A resolved alert never reaches your dispute ratio
Follow an alert end to end
Connected to
Visa Mastercard Verifi, a Visa solution Ethoca by Mastercard
24–72hrs

Notice before the chargeback is filed

0

Alert networks in a single feed

Verifi CDRN and Ethoca Alerts.
0

Ratio impact from an alert resolved in time

24/7

Cover, because issuers do not keep office hours

The process

What happens between
the call and the outcome

Four stages against one clock. Most of them run without anyone on your side touching a keyboard.

  1. Minute 0

    The alert lands

    The issuer passes the query to Verifi or Ethoca and it reaches us within minutes. Transaction, amount, descriptor, reason code and the deadline all arrive with it.

  2. Minutes 1 to 10

    We match it

    It is tied back to the order in your platform, then checked against delivery proof, refund history and any earlier disputes from the same cardholder.

  3. Your 24 to 72 hours

    Refund, or fight it

    Under your auto-refund threshold the refund goes out on its own. Above it you get a recommendation with the reasoning behind it, and the call stays yours.

  4. Before the deadline

    It closes quietly

    The resolution reaches the issuer inside the window and the chargeback is never raised. No fee, no ratio hit, no evidence pack to build.

An illustration of the feed, with sample data. Miss the deadline and nothing is lost that was not already lost: the dispute simply carries on as an ordinary chargeback.

The difference

Same dispute,
two very different endings

Nothing about the customer changes. The only difference is whether you found out in time to do something about it.

  Without alerts With ChargeGuard alerts
When you find out Days or weeks later, when the chargeback notice reaches your processor Minutes after the cardholder calls their bank
What it costs The sale, the goods, the chargeback fee and the hours spent fighting it The refund, plus the alert fee. Nothing else
Dispute ratio Counted against you whether you win the case or not Never counted, because no chargeback is filed
Fulfilment Usually shipped long before you hear anything Often still in the warehouse, so the stock stays yours
The customer Waits out a bank process and rarely comes back Refunded within a day, and sometimes stays
Your team Builds an evidence pack against a deadline nobody chose Approves a decision, or lets the rule handle it

Alerts do not replace representment. They clear out the cases that were never worth fighting, so representment can be aimed at the ones that are.

Coverage

Three ways a dispute
gets stopped early

They come from different places and behave differently. Running only one of them leaves a gap, so we run all three against the same account.

A cardholder checking an unfamiliar charge on their phone
Verifi

Order insight alerts

The cardholder does not recognise a charge and rings the bank. Through Verifi the issuer asks us for the order detail first. Often the billing descriptor is the whole problem, and a straight answer ends it without a refund.

  • The issuer sees the order, not just a line on a statement
  • A descriptor query can close with no refund at all
  • Answered from your order data, so nobody has to be asked
A warehouse aisle where an order can still be pulled before dispatch
Ethoca

Confirmed fraud alerts

Ethoca sends these once the issuer has already confirmed the transaction as fraud. There is no case to win. What matters is refunding fast and pulling the order before it ships, so you are not out the money and the goods.

  • Arrives before dispatch often enough to save the stock
  • Refund goes out on arrival if you want it automatic
  • Repeat cardholders are flagged so the pattern is visible
Rules being written down once, by hand, in a notebook
Visa RDR

Rapid Dispute Resolution

Rules based and fully automatic. You decide in advance which Visa disputes should simply be refunded, by amount and category. Qualifying cases then resolve at Visa with no alert to action and nobody to notify.

  • Settles at the network, so no chargeback is ever created
  • Rules by amount, product and dispute category
  • Covers Visa only, which is why it runs alongside the other two

Four identifiers enrol you. We collect them from your acquirer, you do not have to find them.

MIDMerchant ID. Enrolment is per MID, so a multi-MID account is set up one at a time.
MCCMerchant Category Code. Visa uses it to decide which dispute categories you can auto-resolve.
BINBank Identification Number of your acquirer, which is who Visa applies the rules through.
CAIDCard Acceptor ID. Pairs with the BIN so Visa can match a dispute to the right rule set.

An illustration of the alert view. Sample data, not a real merchant.

Delivery

An alert is only worth having if somebody sees it

The clock starts the moment it arrives, and plenty of them land outside working hours. So you choose how they reach you, and what happens when nobody answers.

  • Email, SMS and dashboard Route by amount or by MID, so a $12 subscription query and a $2,000 order do not wake the same person.
  • Webhook and REST API Push alerts into your own admin, helpdesk or order system and action them where your team already works.
  • Auto-refund rules Set a threshold by value, product or descriptor. Anything under it is refunded on arrival, with a record of every one for your finance team.
  • Escalation before the deadline An alert still sitting open with hours left on the clock goes to your analyst instead of quietly expiring.
Why it pays

What actually changes
once alerts are on

The refund still costs you the sale. Everything stacked on top of it is what alerts take away.

You stop paying twice

A chargeback takes the sale and then adds a fee on top of it. An alert costs you the refund and the alert. That is the whole bill.

Your ratio stays clear

Resolved alerts never become chargebacks, so they never enter the ratio the card networks measure your account on.

The stock stays yours

Fraud alerts often arrive before dispatch. Cancel the order in time and you lose nothing at all, which beats winning the case later.

Fewer bad conversations

The customer has their money back in a day rather than six weeks, and your acquirer sees an account that resolves things quietly.

Team reviewing dispute figures together in a meeting
The honest part

Where alerts stop working

Anyone selling alerts as the complete answer is overselling them. Three things are worth knowing before you sign anything.

  • Coverage depends on the issuer An alert only exists if the cardholder's bank takes part. Most major US issuers do. Some smaller and overseas banks do not, and those disputes still arrive as chargebacks.
  • You pay for every alert Pricing is per alert, so auto-refunding everything is not automatically the cheaper route. We set the thresholds against your real order values, not a default.
  • A refund is still a lost sale Where the evidence is strong and the amount justifies it, fighting the case is the better answer. That is representment, and it runs alongside this.
See how representment fits in
Client feedback

Merchants who
run alerts with us

With customizable dashboards and automated alerts, our team can finally respond to disputes strategically instead of reactively.
E Emily ReyesVP of Risk at Sublytics
Their chargeback reports helped us cut losses significantly. We now act faster, win more disputes, and stay ahead of fraud trends effortlessly.
T Thomas SmithCEO of LTD Company
We had no idea how much money we were losing to avoidable chargebacks. The reports gave us clarity and control we didn’t know we needed.
R Rachel MorganFounder of Morgan Wellness
FAQ

Alerts, answered plainly

If the question is about your own MIDs or your own numbers, ask it directly. An analyst answers, not a chatbot.

Ask us instead

It is a message from the cardholder's bank, passed on through Verifi or Ethoca, saying a customer has queried one of your transactions. It arrives before the bank turns that query into a formal chargeback. Settle it inside the window and the chargeback is never created, so there is nothing to win or lose later.

Between 24 and 72 hours, depending on the network and the alert type. Miss it and the dispute carries on as a normal chargeback. That short window is why alerts go out by SMS and API as well as email, and why auto-refund rules exist for the small transactions nobody wants to be woken up for.

No. The ratio counts chargebacks, and a resolved alert never becomes one. This is usually the real reason merchants take alerts on. Keeping the ratio down protects the merchant account itself, which matters a great deal more than any single disputed sale.

Verifi covers the Visa side, Ethoca covers Mastercard and a wide set of issuers beyond it, and between them you reach most major US and UK banks. Coverage is not universal. Before you commit we run your recent dispute history against both networks and tell you what share would actually have been caught.

They are priced per alert received rather than as a monthly platform fee, so the cost tracks your actual dispute volume. The rate depends on the network and the volume you run through it. You get the number in writing before enrolment, with the break-even point against your average order value.

Largely, yes. Set an auto-refund threshold and everything under it is handled on arrival. Above it, your analyst reviews the case and sends a recommendation to approve. Merchants who want nothing in the inbox at all tend to pair alerts with Visa RDR, which settles qualifying disputes at the network with no message to anyone.

Enrolment with the networks is the slow part, usually a few business days per MID. Connecting your gateway or cart is quicker than that. Nothing about your payment setup changes, and you do not need to move processor or touch your checkout.

Yes. Alerts arrive whenever the cardholder happens to ring their bank, which is often a weekend or an evening, and the deadline does not pause for either. The desk is staffed around the clock, and anything left unactioned with hours still on the clock is escalated rather than left to expire.
Get Started

Find out how many of last month's chargebacks were preventable

Send us your recent dispute data. We will run it against both alert networks and show you which cases would have reached you as an alert first, what resolving them would have cost, and what they cost you instead.

We reply within one business day. No spam, ever.