Fraud orders experience with various vendors

[Jack Norton]

I think that would be useful and interesting comparing your personal experiences with fraudolent orders with the various vendor system. This would be great help for those starting to choose, and as well to evaluate a possible change for developers already using one :)

My ranks:
1) Plimus - excellent. Only one after LOT of sales... percentage would be 0,01% :)
2) eSellerate - a bit disappointing, about 7% of fraudolent orders but I guess that's the norm?
3) Regnow - didn't sold much with them, but got 20% of fraudolent orders!!!

[Fost]

SWREG: no fraud in a year of use, about 3 chargebacks - but they seem to be related to email bounce problems. They have also just activated Verified by Visa and Mastercard secure, so transactions using that are guaranteed against fraud. This system is having its problems (at the individual bank level - not at swreg's end) but SWREG seem to be really on top of things - they have already implemented lots of workarounds, and are also working on more ways to streamline the process.

Paypal: haven't used them in a year, but we used to get a regular trickle of fraud and chargeback. It was pretty easy to do this, so you are relying on customer's good will really. If you accept that, then it really is a tiny percentage of orders, so not worth stressing over.

Share-It - Pretty much the same deal as Paypal - maybe 1% of orders each month. Again, we haven't used them in a year, and they've since been bought up by digital river.

[Sillysoft]

I have been using eSellerate for over 1 year and have never had a fraud order. Cross my fingers...

[tonyedgecombe]

SWReg, no frauds in nearly 350 orders.

RegNow worries me because with their new contract they keep their fee on a fraud or chargeback so there is no incentive to improve their fraud protection. Anyway I have only had a handfull of orders through them so can't really comment.

[princec]

SWREG - about 3 chargebacks in 120 sales or so over the year, no fraud that I know of that wasn't otherwise masked by a chargeback. I suspect the chargebacks were fraud.

Cas :)

[shoecake]

SWREG - 1600+ sales, about 8 frauds/chargebacks.

PayPal - 800+ sales, about 4 frauds/chargebacks.

I dont think theres going to be any obvious patterns in the fraud rate. Some poeple will have higher profile games than others, some games may appeal to the fraudsters more than others etc. I've gone many months with good sales and no frauds then 3 come at once ;)

I'm also under the impression that some frauds are made by people with stolen cards who dont care about the games and are just testing the cards on a random small priced product. This is just one of many explanations for a percentage of frauds.

[Jack Norton]

Thanks. Very interesting info, learned some things that I didn't know like the absurd regnow new policy (wonder what incentive they'll have to block frauds??) and the fact that some orders are only test to see if they stolen CC works :)

[Mike Wiering]

Kagi - I've had chargebacks for about 0.5% of the orders and AFAIK the reason was always fraud. If you count the number of actual game sales, the % of chargebacks is much higher, since these are almost always orders for all of my games at once.

Last November, Kagi started to charge $25 per chargeback, which I think is very much. So I've now almost completely switched to BMTMicro, who cover all of the chargeback fees.