by David True | Sep 11, 2026 | 2026 Q3, Cost Optimization, Operations
VAMP, ECM, and the New Math of Chargebacks: What Smaller Merchants Need to Track Now Visa and Mastercard have spent the last year turning fraud and dispute monitoring from a once-a-quarter surprise into a running scorecard. For small and mid-sized merchants, the...
by David True | Aug 20, 2026 | 2026 Q3, Cost Optimization, Merchant Stories
Payment Descriptors: The Small Line on a Card Statement That Can Prevent Disputes Customer disputes, some of which become chargebacks, eat away at your profit; you can reduce them without spending anything other than some time. One of the easiest ways for a merchant...
by David True | Aug 5, 2026 | 2026 Q3, Cost Optimization, Operations
The Rise of Invisible Payments Invisible payments are becoming a quiet but important shift in how customers complete purchases — and small and medium-sized merchants should pay attention. Whether you sell through your own site, a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce,...
by David True | Jun 18, 2026 | 2026 Q2, Cost Optimization, Operations
Card Acceptance Costs: What Merchants Can Actually Do Interchange and network fees routinely consume 2–3% of merchant revenue, and the trend has moved in one direction for years. For most of the past two decades, the practical options were: absorb it, price it in, or...
by David True | Jun 3, 2026 | 2026 Q2, Operations
Agentic Commerce Planning for SMBs If you are involved in any way in digital commerce, you will have heard talk about agentic commerce – essentially using AI to help customers make purchases. The purpose of this article is to give you a way to think about...
