A chargeback is worse than a refund. You lose the goods, you lose the sale, you pay a fee on top, and your ratio with the card networks ticks upward whether or not you dispute it. Let that ratio climb too far and your processor starts treating you as the risk.
The cheapest chargeback is the one you prevent, and prevention happens before you authorise the card, not after the dispute arrives.
The orders worth a second look
You cannot manually review every order, and you should not try. The goal is to flag the small slice that carries most of the risk so a human, or a stricter automated rule, handles just those:
- Card country, IP country and shipping country all disagreeing.
- The connection coming from a VPN, proxy or datacenter rather than a home or mobile network.
- A prepaid-card BIN on a high-value order.
- Several orders in minutes from one network, each on a different card: the signature of card testing.
Screen in the checkout call
A pre-authorisation screen means running these checks in the moment the order is placed, before you send it to your processor. An IP verdict and a BIN lookup together take a single call and a couple of milliseconds, so they fit inside checkout without anyone noticing a delay.
Low-risk orders sail through untouched. The flagged ones can route to a second factor, a manual queue, or a stricter rule, depending on how much friction your business can carry.
Keep the evidence
Logging the verdict on every order has a second benefit: when a chargeback does arrive, you have a record of what the connection and card looked like at the time, which strengthens a dispute. Fraudex returns IP and BIN verdicts from one key, built to sit inline at checkout, so pre-auth screening is a single step rather than a project.