If you operate a ticketing business, you already know the pain of chargebacks.
They’re unpredictable, expensive, and often completely unfair.
Event canceled? Buyer blames the platform.
Fan forgets they purchased from a reseller? Chargeback.
Bank sees “unfamiliar merchant name”? Dispute filed automatically.
For many platforms, this isn’t just a nuisance - it’s an existential risk.
At First2Pay, we worked with a large European ticket reseller (name withheld for confidentiality) who came to us with this exact problem.
Their business was growing fast - new regions, new suppliers, new volume.
But with that growth came something else: rising chargeback ratios.
Each month, disputes climbed higher.
They were spending hundreds of staff hours responding to claims and refunding transactions that were actually legitimate.
The platform’s acquiring bank had already issued a compliance warning.
That’s when they turned to us.
The first thing we did wasn’t deploy tech - it was listen.
We analyzed six months of dispute data and found three key patterns:
Once we understood the real friction points, we could target them precisely.
We adjusted their processing setup to route transactions through regionally aligned acquirers.
This reduced unnecessary issuer declines and false positives.
It also improved dispute win rates, since evidence came from the right payment region.
We used an automation layer to trigger buyer notifications and confirmations in real time:
That simple communication loop cut “unrecognized transaction” disputes by nearly half in a matter of weeks.
Instead of applying generic fraud filters, we tailored rules to ticketing-specific behaviors:
By teaching the system what “good” looked like in this industry, we prevented legitimate sales from being flagged and reduced false declines - a key hidden source of disputes.
Most importantly, the merchant regained trust with their acquiring bank and avoided penalties that could have jeopardized their account.
Ticketing is not a typical eCommerce category.
It’s high velocity, high value, and high emotion.
Fraud tools designed for retail simply don’t understand it.
The key to solving chargebacks isn’t just better tech - it’s better context.
Understanding what’s normal in ticketing behavior is what turns payment chaos into predictable operations.
Reducing chargebacks is about partnership, not plug-ins.
When your payment partner understands your business model, your risks, and your buyer journey,
you stop reacting to disputes - and start preventing them.