Why do two identical card payments carry different fees?
Because card payments are classified as domestic or cross-border, and your contract can price the two differently. The classification is derived from the card BIN — the leading digits of the card number, which identify the issuing bank and therefore the issuing country:
So
CROSSBORDER is the fallback in every uncertain case. This is deliberate and
conservative, and it has a practical consequence: an unrecognised card is priced
as cross-border, which is normally the more expensive of the two. New or
recently issued BINs are the usual reason a payment you expected to be domestic
was not.
The classification is decided at payment time, recorded on the transaction, and
then used at settlement to pick the matching fee terms. If your contract happens
to have no terms for the classification a transaction was given, the cross-border
terms are applied.
Two things this classification is not:
- It is not the cardholder’s country of residence, or the billing address country — only the issuing institution’s country.
- It is not your own country. The comparison is against the Waffo entity handling that card arrangement, which is why the same card can be domestic under one card arrangement and cross-border under another.
Who pays a transaction tax — me or my customer?
There are exactly three possibilities, set per contract and per payment method:
The mode is recorded on each order when it is created, so it is fixed for that
transaction and does not change retroactively if your contract changes.
Two consequences worth planning around:
- Under user-borne, the amount collected exceeds your order amount. The customer sees and pays the higher figure. Your order amount, and therefore your settlement base, is unaffected.
- Under merchant-borne, the customer sees nothing. The tax is deliberately suppressed from the checkout display, because showing the payer a tax they are not paying is misleading. It surfaces only in your settlement data.
Is a merchant-borne tax broken out as its own column in my settlement file?
No. Settlement files carry generic tax columns, whoever bears the tax:
There is no tax-type-specific column — no separate column naming a particular
country’s transaction tax — and no column that splits merchant-borne from
user-borne tax. If you need a specific tax presented as its own column, or need
the pre-tax order amount alongside the collected amount, that is a custom
report change: raise it with your Waffo account manager rather than expecting it
in the standard files.
Your settlement statement also carries a tax total. Note that where a transaction
tax is not invoiceable in its jurisdiction, it will appear in your settlement data
but not on the invoice.
What is the difference between a dispute and a chargeback, for my money?
The two are distinct record types, and the difference that matters for reconciliation is whether funds move:
So a dispute appearing in your Portal is not a debit and should not be accrued as
one; a chargeback is. For case handling, deadlines, evidence and status flow, see
Chargeback & Dispute FAQ.
The dispute amount in my Portal does not match the amount the bank reversed. Why?
Because you are shown the amount in your own order currency, converted for you, rather than the raw figure from the reversing side. A dispute is raised against the payment as it was processed, which for a cross-currency payment is in a different currency from your order. Rather than show you a figure in a currency you never transacted in, the Portal showsDispute Amount, populated with the merchant dispute amount — the same
dispute expressed in your order currency.
The conversion is deliberately rounded down when apportioning against a
partially refunded order, so that the amount attributed to you never exceeds what
you could actually still be liable for. Two checks are applied when a case is
created: the amount claimed cannot exceed what remains disputable on the order,
and the amount attributed to you cannot exceed your own remaining refundable
amount.
The practical implication: on an order you have partially refunded, the dispute
amount attributed to you is less than the full disputed amount, pro-rated
against what you had not yet refunded. Reconciling a chargeback against the
original order amount will not tie out on a partially refunded order — reconcile
against the merchant dispute amount.
The related fee field is labelled Dispute Fee Amount with its currency stated in
the label, so it is unambiguous which currency the fee is in.
What currency is my chargeback fee in, and does it need an exchange rate?
Your chargeback fee currency is a contract term, configured per merchant account alongside the fee itself. It is not derived from the order and it is not fixed to any particular currency by the platform. Where your chargeback fee currency differs from your settlement currency, the fee has to be converted, so settlement needs aSettlementCurrency/FeeCurrency
rate for the period. This is worth knowing because it explains a Forex Currency Pair appearing on a chargeback row whose order currency already matched your
settlement currency — see
Settlement Calculation Explained
for how the pair is chosen.
Two related rules:
- A chargeback fee is taken as reported for that case, not recalculated from a percentage. It will never reconcile to a rate × amount formula.
- All chargeback fees within one settlement batch must share a single fee currency; the batch is validated for this. A mismatch is a configuration error, not something you need to reconcile around.
Which exchange rate is used when a chargeback settles?
The original payment’s settlement rate, not the rate of the day the chargeback settles. This is a rate-protection rule: reversing a payment at a different rate from the one it settled at would expose you to FX movement on a transaction you have already reconciled. By reusing the original rate, the chargeback reverses the same settlement-currency amount that the payment produced. One consequence follows directly: a chargeback cannot settle before its original payment has settled, because the rate it needs does not exist yet. A chargeback on a very recent payment waits for that payment’s settlement date. For the chargeback fee leg, where a rate for the fee currency pair already exists in that settlement batch, that same rate is reused — so the fee and the amount on one chargeback are converted consistently.How do I export my chargebacks?
From the Chargebacks tab in the Portal, which lists chargeback cases with their identifiers, type, original order id, dispute amount, reason code, dispute status, settlement status, and created and expiry timestamps.What are the limits on the settlement estimation export?
Settlement estimation lets you see fee, tax and settlement figures for transactions that have not settled yet, so you can accrue before the settlement date.
Estimated figures are estimates, and the reason is the exchange rate: an unsettled
transaction has no settlement rate yet, because that rate is not fixed until
settlement. Estimation therefore uses:
- The rate from your most recent successfully settled data for the same merchant account, country and currency pair; failing that,
- A market reference rate.