Purchase Guard is a new service that helps merchants and their clients achieve smoother online interactions. The company aims to make the online shopping experience safer, enjoyable and struggle-free for both merchants and consumers.
Online shopping has come a long way in recent years. However, even though both sides of a transaction may have the best intentions, now and then misunderstandings do happen. It is not uncommon for online purchases to result in a situation where both the consumer and the merchant feel like they have been hard done by.
For example, sometimes a product won’t arrive on time as a result of a failure on the part of the merchant’s logistics partner. And sometimes consumers will complain about not receiving a product or service because it didn’t fulfill their expectations. There is often room for misunderstandings that can result in costly delays for both the merchants and consumers. So as long as these problems go unresolved, there is a risk that they will return at some point in the future to create additional challenges and costs.
Of course, there are several traditional ways consumers can seek to rectify a shopping experience that went awry. For example, they can contact the merchant directly to raise their concerns. There’s no doubt that this is often a good way to go, but if the merchant and the consumer don’t see eye-to-eye and can’t reach an agreement, the shopper’s requests are likely to go unfulfilled. And quite simply, sometimes the merchants aren’t so easy to negotiate with.
The other common approach is for consumers to contact their credit card issuer to issue a chargeback. Again, this also can be a good way to go, but consumers find themselves on the wrong side of the law if they misrepresent their claims. This so-called ‘chargeback fraud’ is a big problem for merchants, and can even result in the shopper who issues the fraudulent chargeback to suffer from a loss of the card or banking services in question. Shoppers who are caught engaging in chargeback fraud might also find out that it has a severe negative effect on their credit scores.
PurchaseGuard.com was developed to overcome the clear downsides of the traditional approaches to dispute resolution. It works by serving as a bridge between consumers and merchants to resolve disputes. For consumers, Purchase Guard provides a simple, easy way to have their issues sorted out for free and without the stress and struggle. And for merchants, Purchase Guard provides a way to manage potential client disputes through an independent dispute resolution service.
Because of its advantages, Purchase Guard has received significant interest from merchants looking to use their service. Additionally, online shoppers who are working with those merchants are making use of the service as well. The first Purchase Guard merchants are in the late stages of their testing periods, and a full-scale rollout to tens of additional merchants is expected to occur before the end of 2019. It will be interesting to see how well Purchase Guard fares in bringing about lasting change to the online shopping ecosystem.
