Descriptors.com · Value calculator

What is customer confusion costing you?

Roughly 55% of all disputes come from a cardholder not recognizing a charge. Put your own numbers in and see what removing even a small slice of that is worth — against the alert fees, chargeback fees and lost order value you are paying today.

Your numbers

Chargebacks and prevention alerts combined, all causes
You lose this on every refund
$
Ethoca or Verifi alerts, billed whether or not you refund
$
Advanced assumptions
Charged by your acquirer per chargeback
$
The rest become chargebacks
%
The addressable ceiling
%
Drives the fraud-record count
%
Even at a 1% reduction in disputes

Reduction
Fees you stop paying
Return on the fee

Dispute records avoided per month at a 10% reduction — TC15 on Visa, first chargeback on Mastercard
Fraud records avoided per month — TC40 / SAFE. Prevention avoids these; alerts arrive after they are filed and cannot remove them.

$20 a month. No integration, no API.

Every payment type, every market. Nothing to build.

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How this is calculated

Fees you stop paying counts only money you do not get invoiced for — the alert fee on disputes your alert program would have caught, and the acquirer chargeback fee on the rest. It excludes order value, so it is the conservative figure. Including revenue kept adds back the order value you no longer refund.

Percentages are a reduction in total dispute volume, not a share of the addressable pool. The confusion-share assumption above sets that pool and you can change it.

This model defaults to a deliberately conservative 55% confusion share. Elsewhere on this site we cite 61%, from a named industry source. The point of the default is that the arithmetic holds at the lower figure, and the assumption is yours to move.

Not included, and all of which push the number up: card-network monitoring fines, remediation costs, staff time spent working an alert queue, and the acquirer-relationship cost of sitting near a VAMP, ECM/HECM or EFM threshold. Fraud-record counts assume deflected disputes were fraud-coded at the rate set above; issuers classify a considerably higher share of disputes as fraud than merchants typically expect.

This is an arithmetic model of your own inputs, not a performance guarantee or a forecast. Actual results depend on your descriptor quality, customer base, vertical and payment mix.

The product behind the number

Descriptors.com

Claim the descriptor your customers actually see, control what it says about your business, and decide how they reach you when they have a question about a charge.

For merchants

Own your profile

Claim, enrich and maintain the record consumers and banks look up. $20 per month, no integration, no processor change.

How it works

For acquirers & ISOs

Resell it

Bring the fix to your own book at your own retail, with portfolio tooling and no build cost.

Partner economics

The full picture

Product overview

How descriptors are boarded, enriched and recognized — and why the data is declared rather than inferred.

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