Nobody likes chargebacks: They’re costly and time-consuming to resolve and can lose merchants a lot of money. But not everybody takes them as personally as Chargehound CTO Dmitri Cherniak once did.
The frustration Cherniak experienced while helping run a crowdfunding platform is what drove him to create a chargeback automation solution — something he had been unable to find on the market back in his retail days. Today, startup Chargehound has come a long way toward becoming that solution for others, and, according to Pallavi Kuppa-Apte, head of Sales and Marketing at Chargehound, the holidays showed it.
Usually, explained Kuppa-Apte, if merchants take a vacation at the end of the holiday rush, they come back in January to find a backlog of thousands of chargebacks to process, putting millions of dollars on the line. It’s no wonder so many people say dealing with chargebacks as the worst part of their job.
Kuppa-Apte said that for at least one client, Chargehound had been quietly, automatically responding to all those chargebacks throughout the vacation week, saving the company around $100,000 while everybody was offline.
Of course, chargebacks don’t occur exclusively during the holidays; that’s just when volumes are at their highest. There’s enough activity year-round that taking chargebacks off employees’ plates can free up a lot of time, talent and capital, said Kuppa-Apte.
“Chargebacks don’t have to be a cost of doing business,” Kuppa-Apte said. “It’s something that has been stressful and painful for many, yet no one has been dealing with it. Chargehound is looking to change the conversation in the chargeback space.”
The startup plans to start changing the conversation this month in two ways.
First, Chargehound is hosting an upcoming webinar that will feature commentary from Sift Science and Patreon about addressing the Q1 chargeback spike and protecting holiday revenue. That’s on Jan. 23.
Second, the startup will make an appearance at National Retail Federation 2018: Retail’s Big Show on Jan. 14–16 in New York, inviting conference guests to connect via hello@chargehound.com.