Whenever a customer files a chargeback claim, they need to explain to their credit card company why they are doing so. These reasons are known as chargeback codes. There are four main chargeback codes: quality, clerical, technical, and fraud.

  • Quality covers things like receiving substandard or faulty products. It also covers cases where the customer never received their purchased item.
  • Clerical chargebacks include duplicate billings, over-excessive service charges, and non-issued refunds.
  • Technical chargebacks may be filed if the customer doesn’t have enough credit remaining on their card for the purchase to go through or if there was a processing error during the transaction.
  • Lastly, and most commonly, fraud chargebacks apply when someone else made a purchase using the customer’s card. As you can likely already guess, these chargebacks are the most common because they are very difficult to disprove. Quality chargebacks are also fairly common, although these are slightly easier to dispute in many cases.