Base44 Payments powered by Wix lets you accept payments directly in your app or site. The best practices below help you build trust with customers, reduce disputes and chargebacks, and keep your Base44 Payments account in good standing.
Contact information
Having easy‑to‑find contact details in your app works to your benefit in many ways. Clear communication enhances your customers’ experience and helps you avoid disputes and chargebacks.
If you do not have a contact form on your app to receive messages from customers, make sure to mention your phone number, email address and an estimated response time. That way, your customers are not left waiting to hear back from you.
Consider adding a link to your Facebook page or other social channels where customers might get a quicker reply.
Reply in a timely manner to show your respect towards your customers and your business.
By allowing regular back‑and‑forth with your customers, you can prevent future problems that may come up down the line.
Document every communication between you and your customers. This is a essential for cases like a dispute.
The more contact methods you provide (for example, email, contact form, social media links, phone number), the more your customers will trust you and your business.
You must include the physical address of your permanent establishment or location in the footer of your app. If the business does not operate out of a physical location, include a mailing address for correspondence instead.
To ensure customers know the entity they are doing business with, add the name of your legal entity or individual entrepreneur to your app, or disclose your Doing‑Business‑As name (this may be your own name as a sole proprietor). We recommend adding this to the Contact Us section of your app, but you can also add it to your app’s footer.
Clear pricing
Displaying clear prices with no hidden fees in your app is essential. Below are some tips that have proven themselves to be useful with merchants around the globe.
Remember that customers view your app on different devices, such as phones and tablets. Make sure your layouts and fonts keep prices easy to read on all screen sizes.
Verify that the text is clear and that the colors stand out so prices are easy to notice.
Show the full price for each product or service, including the currency.
Make sure any additional fee, such as shipping or handling, is clear and easy to understand before checkout. This helps prevent questions and misunderstandings, and reduces the chances that customers feel they were misled in some way.
Refund or return policies
Removing, or even moving, your refund policy to a different area in your app and making it less accessible or visible to shoppers could cause your account to be suspended.
There are more guidelines you should take into account before making changes to your existing refund policy:
Your refund policy needs to be concise and easy to understand.
Make sure your refund or return policy is visible wherever customers review or confirm their purchase. You can also add it to a central “Policies” or “Help” section in your app.
Your refund policy needs to comply with all applicable laws and regulations in the regions where you operate.
You can avoid disputes and complaints by making your refund policy visible and easy to find.
Offering a refund or assistance to your customer is a great way to maintain your good reputation as a merchant.
To help protect your reputation, you may decide in some cases to refund or replace an item, even if the customer made a mistake.
Many refund requests are submitted because the item was not as described or because the service or item was not received. Clear descriptions and communication help reduce these cases.
Shipping and delivery information
If you sell physical or digital goods through your app, including accurate shipping and delivery information is a must. Your business benefits from positive feedback and word of mouth when you maintain open and honest communication with your customers.
Physical goods – what customers need to know
The total cost of shipping must be clear and easy to find.
Specify the shipping carrier (e.g. local post, UPS, FedEx).
Include an estimated delivery date.
Tracking information if available. This is crucial for locating items that weren’t delivered.
If the item is not as described, are shipping fees returned to the customer? Is the customer liable for return-shipping fees?
Digital goods – what customers need to know
Once payment is made, how will the digital product be delivered?
Explain how customers can track or confirm receipt of their digital product.
If the product isn’t as expected, what options are available to the customer?
If you do not make the required information visible to your customers, it can lead to negative feedback about your business and may result in your account being suspended.
Privacy policy, and terms and conditions
Every app should provide a privacy policy. This is a statement that discloses the ways your app collects, uses, discloses, and manages the data of its visitors and customers. The privacy policy fulfills a legal requirement to inform a visitor about how their data is processed.
Your privacy policy should explain, in simple language:
What data you collect from visitors and customers, such as names, email addresses or payment details where relevant.
How you use, store and share that data.
How long you keep data and how customers can request access to or deletion of their data, where applicable.
Customer disputes
As much as you try to please your customers, unhappy customer experiences do unfortunately occur. Naturally, these experiences are not always avoidable and are part of doing business online.
If, for any reason, a customer is dissatisfied with a purchase made on your app, they have the right to contact their bank and dispute the charges or purchase made at your establishment. In the majority of cases banks do tend to side with their customers, but you can lessen the blow by following some important basic steps:
Respond to customer calls or emails in a timely manner.
Keep records of emails and calls with clients. These can be used in disputes and could become the deciding factor in your favor.
If it’s a digital product and you can prove the item was downloaded and used, this is imperative in proving your case. Records of emails/calls to your business requesting support for a digital item can prove the item was received and that you have assisted the customer.
If a physical product, receipts showing it was delivered and signed for are recommended for resolving disputes and supporting your case.
If the refund request was received in the first 7 days after its delivery, did you comply?
Chargebacks
Sometimes a payment dispute can result in a chargeback from the customer’s bank. If you have been conducting business online for a while, you may already be familiar with chargebacks. Just in case you have not yet received one, here is a brief explanation.
A chargeback is a demand by a credit card provider for a merchant to return the funds to a consumer, following a fraudulent or disputed transaction. Unlike a refund request, where it’s just between you and the customer, a chargeback gets the banks and the credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, etc.) into the mix, which can have negative consequences.
Keep the following points in mind:
Any chargeback requires time and resources from everyone involved. If you receive a chargeback, you also incur a chargeback fee.
With a chargeback, the payment funds are taken from you and returned to the customer, even if you already provided the product or service.
In addition to losing the transaction amount and fee, your business may be “marked” by the bank. The more chargebacks you get, the more banks and credit card companies may view you as a risky merchant.
Your primary goal should be to keep chargebacks to a minimum and resolve customer disputes before they turn into chargebacks.
Chargeback "points" are never removed from your record. The more chargebacks you get, the higher your chances are of being labeled a "risky" merchant and then suspended from Base44 Payments and/or other payment providers. Keep in mind that you can file a dispute for any chargeback you believe is unjustified.
This article is credited to the Wix team - https://support.wix.com/ and we thank them for that!