Early Alerts Onboarding

Welcome to Early Alerts

As part of our suite of chargeback management tools, we are excited to offer Early Alerts (powered by Ethoca Alerts). This proactive solution is designed to help you get ahead of the chargeback cycle, saving you both money and operational headaches.

• If you are a prospective merchant, you can learn more about our product by getting in touch with your dedicated Account Manager or our Sales team at sales@riskified.com. 

• If you are a partnered merchant who is starting to use Early Alerts, welcome! You’ve come to the right place. Below you will find an overview of the product, along with links to instructional guides to get you started.

What are Early Alerts?

Early Alerts (powered by Ethoca) is a real-time notification system that acts as an "early warning" for your business. When a cardholder confirms a fraudulent transaction or disputes a charge with their bank, an alert is generated and sent to you immediately—often weeks before it would normally evolve into a formal chargeback. By receiving this data in real-time, you can take instant action, such as stopping the shipment of goods or canceling a digital service, effectively "stopping the clock" on fraud.

By consuming these alerts through Riskified, you gain a significant edge over just using the Ethoca platform. Our system automatically matches alerts to the original order data, eliminating the need for your team to manually hunt for transaction details across different platforms. This "one-stop-shop" approach allows you to manage disputes and alerts in a single view, significantly reducing chargeback rates, avoiding associated bank fees, and protecting your merchant standing with card networks.

Key Benefits:

• Prevent Financial Loss: Stop the fulfillment of fraudulent orders before they leave the warehouse.
• Reduce Operational Overhead: Use Riskified’s Control Center to filter, view, and act on alerts without jumping between multiple systems.
• Broad Coverage: While powered by Mastercard, the network covers a significant portion of Visa and Amex transactions as well.

Early Alerts Integration

If you are already using one of our other products, the greatest advantage of Early Alerts is that it requires zero technical integration effort from your engineering team. Because Riskified is already integrated with your order flow, we can layer this service on top of your existing setup without a single line of new code. The setup is handled almost entirely on the backend between Riskified and Ethoca.

To get started, the onboarding process is simple and typically follows these steps:

1. Descriptor Alignment: You simply provide us with a full list of your merchant descriptors (the names that appear on your customers' bank statements). We use these to ensure the Ethoca network correctly identifies and routes alerts related to your business.
2. Configuration: Riskified handles the internal configuration in your Control Center. 

Network Activation: Ethoca performs an internal configuration on their side. Once complete, alerts will automatically populate within the Control Center (Riskified’s web app). We will give you access to the Early Alerts page in the Control Center so your team can begin resolving disputes immediately.

Get Started: Early Alerts Instruction Guides

Ready to dive in? Below are the basics of Early Alerts. 
(Note: You must be signed into your Zendesk Help Center account in order to access these resources.)

• Search and View Ethoca Alerts
• Take Action on Ethoca Alerts
• Data Filters for Ethoca Alerts
• Data Export for Ethoca Alerts
• User Management

We're happy to help you if you have other questions and hear how we can make Early Alerts better for your business. Share your questions and suggestions with your Account Manager or support@riskified.com, and we'll pass the feedback along to our Product team.