We’ve never had a lot of chargebacks (a chargeback is when a customer calls their credit card company to dispute a charge they don’t recognize), but last year we made a simple change that reduced our chargebacks by 30% as a percentage of sales.

I can’t be certain the reduction is entirely due to this technique, but we didn’t change anything else related to how we deal with chargebacks.

Background

One of the issues we have at 37signals is that many people know our product names better than they know 37signals. They sign up for Basecamp or Highrise without knowing that there’s a company called 37signals behind the product.

So sometimes people see a charge on their card from 37signals but they don’t know what it’s for. And even if they did remember 37signals, they still may not recognize the charge.

We also sell more than just our web apps. We sell job ads on the Job Board and Getting Real as a $19 PDF. So we sell a lot of different things at a lot of different price points, but the line item on people’s credit card statements always look the same.

We’ve recently gained the capability to change the charge statement entry to reflect the product being charged (“Basecamp” for a Basecamp charge instead of “37signals, LLC.”), but for various reasons we haven’t enabled it yet.

2007

When we charge someone’s credit card, “37signals, LLC” used to appear on their card statement. We also included a phone number that played a recording explaining the charge. This was alright, but it didn’t feel good enough. Ideally we’d have a live phone number, but we’re just not set up to take customer support calls at this time. (we’re entirely email based).

2008

I was thinking about how we could do a better job explaining a charge, but we were only allowed a limited number of characters on the customer’s billing statement.

According to the merchant/card rules:

Your company name/DBA section must be either 3, 7 or 12 characters and the product descriptor 4, 8 or 13 characters.

That means we could do something like:

37signa*Basecamp 800.xxx.xxxx IL

or even…

37s*Basecamp 800.xxx.xxxx IL

But that doesn’t help a whole lot either. It’s definitely better than just 37signals or just Basecamp, but it’s still not as clear as I’d like it to be.

If you don’t use a product descriptor (“Basecamp” or “Backpack”), you get 22 characters. So I decided to register 37signals-charge.com, redirect it to 37signals.com/charge, write up a page explaining why there’s a charge on your card, and put that URL on people’s charge slips instead of “37signals, LLC” or “Basecamp” or “Highrise” etc.

Now when someone buys something from us, this line item shows up on their credit card statement:

37signals-charge.com 800.xxx.xxxx IL

Visiting that URL takes you to this page where we explain the charge, the products, some suggestions if you don’t recognize the products, and a link to our billing support form someone needs additional help.

Quick win for 30% less chargebacks

So while chargebacks in raw dollars are up because sales are up, chargebacks as a percentage of total sales were down 30% in 2008.

And the best part about it is that it only took one day to implement this change. Register a new domain, then call the merchant card company to update the message on our customer’s statements, write up a page explaining the charges, and set up a redirect on the server. Simple.

We’ve been working hard to make it easier to organize and access your Backpack pages. Earlier this month we released reorderable sidebar links. Today we’re announcing another feature for your sidebar. Now you can add tags to your sidebar too.

Tags are like keywords you can use to label a page. If you have some pages that relate to sales, you can add a “sales” tag to each page. Then you can click “sales” on your “All Pages” screen to quickly see all pages that have been labeled “sales.” Basically tags are a simple and powerful way to group your pages together so you can easily find them later. Tags have been available in Backpack for a long time. What’s new today is that you can bookmark your favorite tags in your sidebar so you can easily jump to tagged pages.

Here’s how it works. First make sure you have some pages tagged. You can tag a page by clicking the “Tag” link on the top of any of your pages:

After you have tagged some pages, you can click the “All Pages” link in the sidebar to see a list of all your tags. The “All Pages” screen has a list of your tags on the right side:

Continued…

Last week we launched a new feature for Backpack that allows people to comment on the to-do items and notes on their Backpack pages. We had actually built this feature a few months earlier for Basecamp. Since we had already built commentable to-do items for Basecamp, we could have just retraced our steps and built a look-a-like feature in Backpack. However there were a couple bumps in the experience that we didn’t want to carry over. We took the Backpack implementation as a chance to reconsider those bumps in the earlier Basecamp version so that both apps can be better in the end. Along the way we found a really nice method for positioning our comment icons relative to the flowing text of a to-do item.

Here’s how the feature works in Basecamp. When you hover your mouse over a to-do item, a comment icon appears on the right side of the to-do text:

We implemented this by rendering the comment icon after the text of the to-do item as an inline element. The to-do text and the icon are rendered within the same containing block like this:

<div>
  This is the text of the to-do.
  <img src="comment_icon.png" style="display: none;" />
</div>

Continued…

As we continue to make tweaks to the Highrise marketing site, I wanted to share the writing process I went through last week.

The goal was to fit the same amount of information into roughly the same horizontal space, but one-third less vertical space without just shrinking and cramming everything together.

I didn’t want to shrink the icons or the font sizes. This meant the actual copy was on the chopping block. Almost every paragraph on every page on every piece of paper or every screen can be edited down without losing meaning. I love the challenge.

The process

The first thing I do when I want to cut out some words is not read the original version. I just write a new one. I don’t want to be influenced by what I thought I had to say before. I want to think about what I want to say now. After I’ve written a new one I go back to the old one to see if there was anything critical I missed.

Continued…

I’m happy to be teaming up with Carson Workshops to offer a full-day workshop in London on April 27. I’m going to take complete advantage of the full day to go deep into all aspects of UI design and development. I’ll cover everything from feature conception and sketches to HTML/CSS mocks and collaboration with developers on Rails templates. In addition to insight on designing clear and truly understandable interfaces, I’ll also be giving a rare look into 37signals’ coding style from HTML markup to CSS to Rails templates.

A great thing about these workshops is the size. We’re capping the day at 40 people so I will surely be able to take questions throughout the day and follow your own interests at length. Think of me as your consultant for the day. This is a great opportunity to get a first-hand experience of 37signals’ design process from the big-picture vision all the way down to individual pixels and coding decisions.

Where and When?

Mon, 27th April 2009
Workshop: 9:00am — 5:00pm
Social: 5:30pm till late
Venue: RIBA London
Spaces: 40

Visit the Carson Workshops page to register. And bring your best questions and ideas. Hope to see you there!

We’re very excited to announce a new Backpack feature. Now you can post comments and add attachments to list items and notes on your Backpack pages. Every list item or note can be a starting point for a discussion.

To comment on an item, hover over it with your mouse. You’ll see a comment icon appear on the right side:

Click the comment icon to see the comment page for that list item. You can check and uncheck the item at the top of the page. Use the comment form to post your thoughts or attach files:

After one or more comments are posted to an item, an icon will appear beside the item with the number of comments inside it:

This is an incredibly useful feature that turns every page into an opportunity for discussion and clarification. We hope you enjoy posting comments to list items and notes. Thanks for organizing your life and business with Backpack!