I own a small online store using a processor that is charging me chargebacks and are blaming my gateway or shopping cart when it is clearly a problem on their end. I am at the end of my rope with this processor. The problem: Months back i began getting phone calls from customers complaining that the amount pending in their accounts for their order was only a fraction of the cost of the order total. For example, an order for $67.95 would only have $8 pending for the order. After several of these calls I contacted my processor who is supposed to work between my gateway and merchant. What I was told is that the small pending amount would delete once the rest of the order amount goes through. This made no sense because the gateway was authorizing the full amount of the orders, so how does a fraction of the total order amount be pending and not the entire sale amount? After speaking with all possible parties involved, none took responsibility nor could explain why this was occurring, but not to worry because "Chanel" and other vendors do this same weird pending amounts.
Now I have five chargebacks showing in my statements due to "non authorization" which at first I thought were fraudulent orders, but after digging deeper was told that they were charged back because they didn't have an authorization. What happens is the small pending amount would have the authorization, so when the rest of the amount was withdrawn from their credit cards they did not have authorization. One transaction cannot have two authorizations so the credit card companies called my merchant stating this fact and they deducted the amounts from my bank along with a $25 chargeback fee. In the end, these customers only ended up paying that initial small pending amount for their orders. I've spoken to two of these customers who both said they did not call in the order as fraudulent, and looked into their records and noticed that the total order amount was withdrawn, but a month later they were credited the amount less than the small pending amounts...so per my example of the order of $67.95, 59.95 was credited back to his account and the $8 pending amount was all he ended up paying.
I cannot seem to find any information on this happening even though my processor states that it happens all the time. They are trying to blame my gateway or shopping cart, or that it is an IT issue on my end for these mystery pending amounts, which is impossible because all the authorizations and batch outs from my gateway are of the correct order amounts...the processor is the entity that gathers the batches and then withdrawals the money from the customers credit card accounts and deal with their banks, not the gateway and certainly not my shopping cart.
So, i am asking if anybody has had this happen to them before...and if you know anything about these type of occurrences so I have a chance to get my money back by recharging those customers who got their money back and get all those chargeback fees reversed. At this point, I am dealing with the owner of iprocessing and she's not going to budge even though I have all the proof that all the issues began when their part of the process began. Am I over looking something? Please, any insight would be appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
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