IC: Illegible Sales Data

Poor receipt quality makes it very easy for customers to win disputes against you. Faded thermal receipts that sit in cash drawers for months eventually create problems. Blurry scans and low-quality receipt photos automatically trigger the IC reason codes, and this hurts your chargeback ratios as it harms your standing with Discover. You need perfectly readable and easy-to-read transaction records that stay completely legible even after months of storage.

Record management saves you from a lot of problems with chargebacks that don’t need to happen in the first place, and it keeps your sales money right where it belongs – in your pocket. IC assignments have specific laws you have to follow, and merchants face the standards they have to meet if they want to avoid losing money over receipt problems.

How It Works

When a cardholder disputes a transaction with Discover, the card network sends you something that they call a retrieval request. What they’re actually asking is for you to show that the transaction happened the way you say it did. You get just one chance to make your case, and you don’t get to try again.

Most merchants rush to find the receipt and send it over as fast as they can. The bigger problem shows up when that receipt turns out to be impossible to read. Maybe you were printing on a thermal printer, and the text has faded over the past few months.

Or maybe the document got scanned at very low quality to save some file space. Sometimes the signature area gets so smudged that nobody can see what’s there, and the transaction info gets cut off during the copying.

At this point, the situation gets pretty frustrating. Even if the charge was legitimate and the customer did buy from you, Discover just won’t care if they can’t read the proof that you sent. They’ll take one look at your blurry receipt or faded document and mark the whole document as illegible. You don’t get a second shot to send a better copy. You can’t even phone them and explain what the document says.

Discover decides that the paperwork is illegible and automatically adds an IC chargeback to your account. The whole process moves very fast. You might submit your response on a Monday and wake up to find a chargeback sitting in your account by Thursday – and it just doesn’t matter that you replied on time or that the transaction was completely legitimate. The only thing that matters is that Discover could read each detail on the document that you sent.

How it Affects Chargeback Prevention

Get an IC chargeback from Discover, and the money is walking out the door for no valid reason. The transaction was legitimate, and the customer got just what they paid for. The only actual problem is that your receipt is impossible to read.

IC chargebacks are nothing like fraud disputes, where a thief steals a card number and goes on a shopping spree. They happen because of simple mistakes that you can fix quickly. Maybe your receipt printer needs some fresh ink, or the thermal paper has gone bad, and the text is no longer readable. These are simple problems with simple solutions.

Every IC chargeback that you receive pushes your chargeback ratio higher. Discover keeps a close eye on these numbers, and piling up too many disputes can land you in one of their watch programs. Once that happens, you’ll pay higher processing fees and face tighter laws that make it much harder to run your business the way you like.

The most frustrating part is how easily you can avoid these chargebacks. A decent receipt printer costs far less than what you’ll probably lose from a single IC chargeback. Online receipt systems work even better because they never fade or smudge the way that thermal paper does. Make sure that your store receipts are readable and that your equipment is in proper working order, and you’ll protect every legitimate sale.

Once you remove IC chargebacks from the equation, your dispute win rate should jump. You won’t be losing simple cases because the documents were too blurry to read. All the time and energy that you’ve been spending on those losses can now be put toward the actual issue – the fraud attempts. More of your revenue stays where it belongs – in your account.

Example Scenarios

When a restaurant receipt fades after 3 months in storage, the merchant has a problem. The customer disputes the charge, and the bank wants proof of the transaction. But that is now just a blank sheet with ghost text that nobody can read. The merchant remembers the transaction well but can’t prove it actually happened. The result is a chargeback and lost revenue.

Online sellers run into this same issue in a different way. Maybe you take a screenshot of the online receipt to save for your records, and it looks fine on your phone screen at the time. Then, 6 months later, right as you need to fight a dispute, the image is too blurry to make out the card numbers or transaction amounts. The sale was legitimate. But you can’t prove it anymore.

Physical stores make a different mistake that creates the same problem. They photocopy receipts at the end of each day as a backup. But the office copier is set in draft mode to save on toner costs. Those copies might look fine, but try to read the transaction information and the numbers blur together into something you can’t read. You did everything right except for the one printer setting that seemed minor at the time.

These situations all start the same way – with a normal sale and a satisfied customer who walks away happy. The problems only show up months later, as that customer either forgets what they bought or decides they want their money back for whatever reason.

Requirements and Timeframes

When Discover sends you that request for transaction paperwork, you have somewhere between 5 and 10 business days to pull everything together and send it all back to them. Miss that deadline, and you might as well give them the chargeback win because that’s just what will happen. The clock starts the second they send out that request, and there isn’t much room for delays after that.

Discover can be pretty particular about the receipts and paperwork that you send them. If your paperwork doesn’t line up with what they want to see, they’ll send the whole batch right back to you without any hesitation. The transaction amount has to be completely easy to read – there’s no room for errors on this part. The same standards apply to the transaction date, the last four digits of the card number, and the authorization code that was created when the transaction went through. If any detail is blurry, smudged, or accidentally cut off somehow, then you’ll be back to square one all over again.

When you submit documents online, image quality matters quite a bit. Discover has some pretty strict standards here, and they’re just not going to accept those blurry phone photos where you can barely make out the account numbers. I see this with merchants all the time – they rush through the submission process and wind up needing to start completely over when their photos get rejected for being too fuzzy. PDF and JPEG files work well for most situations, though you should probably check their latest policies because they like to change without much warning.

Record-keeping laws give business owners more issues than just about any other compliance issue out there. The laws are very strict – there’s no room for flexibility at all with storing those records. Merchants figure they can just toss old receipts after 2 months to free up some storage space around the office – this mistake happens all the time, and that seemingly harmless choice usually comes back to bite them in a pretty expensive way.

Those old IC codes that merchants used to work with have been replaced with newer dispute categories and classification systems over the past few years. The core laws haven’t moved at all from where they’ve always been. Discover still wants strong proof that your transaction actually happened just the way that you say it did. Half-finished paperwork, missing receipts, or records that don’t tell the full story just aren’t going to cut it with them.