From Reactive Refunding to Revenue Recovery

The challenge

The merchant’s chargeback rate breached 2% in 2019, raising red flags with acquirers and the card networks. Refunding preemptively seemed safe, but it bled the business dry: profitability suffered, disputes weren’t solved, and the team was stuck reacting instead of optimizing.

Marketing and growth initiatives were throttled by outdated risk controls. Every pricing or promotional change came with second-guessing from risk and finance. The root cause was a lack of visibility into what was truly driving the risk.

The approach

With Revolv3 providing optimized processing infrastructure and decline data, SLYCE360 became the command center for the merchant’s risk and refund strategies. The team worked alongside the merchant to customize the rules engine, define thresholds for refund and chargeback signals, and tailor alerts to their historical transaction behavior.

Fraud-prone verticals were isolated, chargeback clusters were traced to root causes, and refund trends were broken down by campaign, processor and customer behavior. Through segmentation and alert-based intelligence, the merchant issued refunds only when they made sense, not as a blanket defense.

The results

The return rate in targeted segments fell from 15.69% to 3.45%, saving more than $630,000 a year while the chargeback rate held at 0.02%. Internal teams that spent hours each week on manual refund review, escalations and compliance reporting now spend that time on go-forward strategy.