LP: Late Presentation

Most card networks give you 10 calendar days from the original transaction date to get everything processed. Miss that deadline and you’ll probably lose the dispute, no matter how strong your case looks.

What makes LP chargebacks especially frustrating is that they have nothing to do with fraud or unhappy customers. Your product could be perfect, and your customer could be thrilled with the order, but these disputes can still pop up. The problem is simple – charges that appear on the statement weeks after a customer made the purchase usually go unrecognized. Cardholders call their bank to dispute what looks like an unfamiliar charge, and suddenly, there’s a chargeback heading your way.

Aside from the headache, expect chargeback fees that usually run anywhere from $20 to $100 per dispute. Add to that all the time your team is going to need to collect paperwork and put together your reply to the dispute. Even with solid proof that the customer approved the order, you can still lose because the submission timeline was missed.

LP chargebacks can start to pile up fast over time, and the most frustrating part is how avoidable they are. When business owners first run into hot water with these fees, improving customer service or adding extra security layers to the payment process won’t help. The fix is simple – you just need to submit your transaction data within the right timeframe.

How It Works

When a merchant waits too long to submit a transaction to Discover, the whole process breaks down. Maybe the point-of-sale system had a glitch over the weekend or basically forgot to run the batch at closing. Whatever caused the delay, it gives you a headache that nobody wants.

The charge finally shows up on the customer’s statement weeks (or a month) after they made the buy. They look at their monthly bill and have no idea what this random charge is for. Customers don’t hold mental records of the transactions from a month ago, so they call their bank to dispute them.

From there, the situation gets very frustrating for everyone involved. The customer legitimately doesn’t remember making the buy because too much time has passed. Discover sees the late submission and automatically assigns the LP reason code. Now you have to prove that the transaction was legitimate – even though the customer likely did authorize it in the first place.

The paperwork piles up faster after that. You have to show the original transaction date and the submission date and explain why the delay happened. Then you need proof that the customer did make that buy. All this paperwork can take 60 to 90 days to wrap up. During that time, your merchant account takes a financial hit, and you’re out of the money until everything is worked out.

Requirements and Timeframes

Discover tells you that you have 10 days to send in your transactions, and they mean it. It’s not a friendly reminder or some loose guideline you can work around – it’s a hard deadline that most merchants need to follow. You have a full 10 calendar days from the transaction date to manage those card payments. Miss that window and you’re stuck with a chargeback that you just can’t dispute.

The situation gets a bit harder depending on what type of business you run.

• Hotels usually have different rules because guests might extend their stay or add extra room-service charges.
• Airlines manage the bookings that customers made months ahead of time.
• Car-rental places have to work with deposits and final charges that happen at very different points in time.

If any of these sound like your business, then you need to look into the exact rules that apply to your situation.

The hard part is that your business might actually manage a few different types of transactions. Maybe you run a hotel that also has a gift shop and restaurant attached – each part of your business could have its own separate deadline that you need to track. You can’t simply believe that one policy is going to cover everything that you do.

These rules come directly from Discover’s network policies. They update their rules each year, and sometimes those deadlines will move around. What worked just fine last year might leave you in trouble. You want to review the latest policies as you start taking care of payments. Don’t wait until your inbox gets a chargeback notice to learn what the rules are.

How it Affects Chargeback Prevention

Your chargeback numbers tell a story, and LP chargebacks probably feel like salt in the wound. These disputes hurt your dispute ratio and push you dangerously closer to those card network thresholds that nobody wants to cross. What makes it even more frustrating is that each one of these chargebacks was completely preventable.

Think about what you’re already up against every day. You’re always fighting fraud chargebacks and unhappy customers who dispute purchases they actually made. Now you have to add LP chargebacks to that growing pile of problems, all because some of the transactions went through a little too late. The dispute rate keeps climbing higher and higher, and your processor starts to notice your account activity.

Once your dispute ratio crosses those industry thresholds, the problems start to surface. Your processing fees increase first, and they hit your bottom line right away. Then come the watch-list programs with their expensive monthly penalties that add up fast. Eventually, you could wind up with account restrictions or lose your ability to process credit cards altogether – this whole mess starts just because some of the transactions took too long to make their way through the system.

The news is that LP chargebacks are actually the easiest type of dispute to avoid. You don’t need fraud detection tools or a bigger customer service team. You just need to process transactions on time every time. Set up automated systems to manage your recurring charges and keep a close eye on your transaction queues throughout the day. Don’t let anything sit around for too long in the queue.

Your banking relationships are worth protecting, too. High chargeback rates make banks nervous about your merchant account, and they may start requiring extra reserves or impose much stricter terms on your agreement going forward.

Example Scenarios

Late presentation chargebacks happen all the time in actual businesses, and the scenarios are pretty basic. A busy restaurant on a Saturday night may have its credit card terminal crash right in the middle of the dinner rush. The manager has no choice but to write down the card numbers and run them manually on Monday morning – except that’s already 3 days since those meals were served. The work takes another day, and the batch doesn’t close until Tuesday. Now they’re sitting at 5 days and still need to wait for their processor to submit everything to Discover.

Retail stores run into the same problem all the time. A small boutique that processes orders by hand each morning might take a long weekend, and suddenly, those Friday orders don’t get worked on until Tuesday. Add in the payment gateway’s processing time, and they’re already pushing that 10-day limit. Service businesses face this same problem when they invoice clients weeks after completing the work. A consultation done on the 1st of the month might not get billed until the 15th, and by then, they’re already in a tight place.

Once you submit a transaction after 10 days, you’re asking for problems. Discover will almost automatically approve a chargeback if the customer disputes it – even if you have perfect records and the service was actually provided. Customers see these delayed charges pop up on their statements and legitimately don’t remember what they bought. Your dispute ratio takes a hit, and the whole mess can drag on for 2 or 3 months as the banks sort everything out.