Digital River Customer Service — Operational Guide

Overview

Digital River is a global commerce and payments technology provider (established 1994) that operates as the back-end engine for brands selling directly to consumers in multiple markets. The company’s platform combines payments, tax and VAT calculation, fraud detection, localized checkout, legal compliance, and global settlement. Merchants interacting with Digital River will typically use a commercial agreement and an online merchant portal that centralizes orders, settlements, returns, and reporting; the public entry point is https://www.digitalriver.com.

From a customer-service perspective, Digital River is both a merchant-facing technology/service provider and an operator of consumer-facing contact centers on behalf of its clients. That dual role creates two distinct support models: (1) account, technical and reconciliation support for the merchant, and (2) order, delivery, returns and refund support for the end customer. Understanding which role applies to a given interaction is essential to routing, SLAs and data access.

Support model — merchant vs. end-customer

Merchant-facing support is centered on onboarding, integrations, settlement reconciliation, tax and VAT configuration, chargeback management and custom reporting. Typical interactions include integration bugs (API/webhook issues), settlement discrepancies, batch reporting errors, and requests for transactional evidence. Merchants receive account managers and technical contacts; enterprise clients often have a dedicated client success manager and scheduled business reviews (monthly or quarterly).

Consumer-facing support is focused on order status, shipping, cancellations and refunds. Digital River commonly operates consumer contact centers on a 24/7 or extended-hours basis for high-volume brands, providing multilingual support, IVR routing, chat and email. For end customers the first contact is usually via order-confirmation emails, which include the merchant’s branded support phone number or an order lookup portal; these self-service pathways reduce agent volume for basic queries.

Channels, hours and typical response times

Channels include phone, live chat, email/ticket portal, IVR, social channels and a knowledge base/FAQ. For merchant technical issues, ticketing portals and phone-based escalation to technical account teams are common; for consumer issues, phone and chat deliver the fastest resolution and email is used for documentation-heavy workflows (returns, proofs).

• Phone/Live Chat (consumer urgent): expected answer within 1–3 minutes for premium queues; target first-contact resolution (FCR) of 60–80% depending on complexity.
• Email/Portal (merchant & consumer non-urgent): acknowledgement within 1 business hour for SLA-tiered accounts; substantive reply in 4–24 business hours for Tier 1, 24–72 hours for Tier 2.
• Refund processing: refunds issued by Digital River are typically initiated within 24–72 hours of approval; card network posting commonly takes 3–10 business days, depending on the issuing bank.
• Fraud/Payments incidents: incident response and mitigation is staffed 24/7 for enterprise payment risk; initial containment and triage aims for sub-60-minute response on active fraud spikes.

Disputes, chargebacks and refunds — practical workflow

Chargeback and dispute handling is a structured process: when a cardholder disputes a charge the issuer issues a chargeback to the acquirer, which forwards to Digital River as the merchant of record. Digital River assembles the representment packet (sales receipt, AVS/CVV data, shipping proof, communications) and either fights or settles the dispute. Timelines are dictated by the card network—preparing evidence within 7–30 days is the operational window many teams use to ensure timely submission.

Refunds are treated differently from chargebacks: a refund initiated by the merchant or Digital River is processed back to the original payment instrument. Operationally, merchants should expect refunds to be created in the platform within 1–3 business days and to appear on the customer’s account within 3–10 business days; international payments and currency conversions can extend that to 10–30 days in some banking corridors.

Technical support & APIs

Digital River provides RESTful APIs, webhooks, SDKs and a sandbox environment for integration testing. Key technical support items include API key management, environment parity (sandbox vs production), idempotency and retry logic for transient network errors. Best practice is to use idempotency keys for payment endpoints and to log webhook receipts with HTTP status codes to accelerate investigation.

For integration incidents, provide the following in a ticket: timestamps (UTC), request/response headers (without secrets), transaction IDs (order ID, payment ID), sample payloads and replay steps. This granular data shortens mean time to resolution (MTTR) and reduces back-and-forth clarifications between merchant developers and Digital River technical support.

Performance metrics, KPIs and reporting

Operational transparency is provided through scheduled reports, real-time dashboards and ad hoc exports. Key reconciliation items are gross volume, refunds, chargebacks, fees, foreign-exchange adjustments and settlement batches. Merchants should reconcile daily settlements to their bank deposits and run weekly chargeback reports to detect patterns early.

• Availability/Uptime: target ≥99.9% for payment API endpoints for production traffic.
• Authorization rate: a healthy merchant profile usually sees 80–95% authorization rates depending on geography and payment methods; lower rates indicate BIN, routing or configuration issues.
• Chargeback rate: target <0.5% of gross volume for most consumer brands; sustained levels above this trigger additional risk controls.
• Customer service KPIs: CSAT ≥80%, FCR 60–75%, average handle time (AHT) 4–8 minutes for consumer voice channels.

Best practices for merchants working with Digital River customer service

Prepare an onboarding checklist that includes test card sets for each region, a returns-playbook, tax/VAT configuration review, and a fraud threshold tuning session. Negotiate SLAs that specify response targets, settlement cadence (daily vs weekly), chargeback liability handling, and service credits for downtime. Include runbooks for high-volume events such as product launches or promotional spikes to scale support quickly.

Maintain a technical runbook with webhook endpoints, failover processes, and contact lists for escalation (technical lead, account manager, payments ops). Use the sandbox aggressively: replicate refund/chargeback flows in test to verify downstream ERP and accounting reconciliation prior to production pushes. For merchants selling in the EU, ensure VAT handling is tested with real sample flows (different VAT rates, B2B VAT validation, OSS reporting where applicable).

Escalations, compliance and data privacy

Escalation paths should be documented in the commercial agreement: standard path (ticket → account manager → technical lead) and emergency path (24/7 on-call for payment outages). For compliance, Digital River and the merchant must coordinate on PCI DSS, GDPR/UK-GDPR and other local data protection laws; breach notification obligations under GDPR require notification to supervisory authorities within 72 hours for reportable incidents, so include legal and incident-response contacts in the escalation matrix.

Digital River typically supports evidence for audits and will provide attestation documents (under NDA) such as SOC reports or PCI attestations where applicable. Merchants must also enforce least-privilege access in the merchant portal, rotate API keys periodically, and retain logs for the timeframe required by local regulations (often 3–7 years for finance tax audits).

Contact resources

Start with the public site for corporate and product information: https://www.digitalriver.com. Merchant customers should use the merchant portal or their contractual account manager for prioritized support; end customers should use the branded support details in order confirmations or the merchant’s help pages. Many brands using Digital River include a “Contact us” phone number and an order lookup portal link in transactional emails.

If you are a merchant preparing for an audit, integration, or a major promotional launch: compile a packet with representative order IDs, sample API request/response logs (redacting secrets), settlement reports, and a clear problem statement before opening a technical ticket—this reduces MTTR and speeds resolution. For legal or compliance requests, route through your Digital River account manager to ensure coordinated responses and preservation of evidence.