Overview
⚠️ What to expect from your AmEx and Discover coverage. American Express coverage is normally only around 10% (typically 5% to 15%) of your AmEx chargebacks. Adding extra AmEx coverage may roughly double that, but even then AmEx will never be as well protected as Visa or Mastercard. The same applies to Discover.
Ethoca does not share how much additional coverage you'll receive for American Express or Discover. AmEx and Discover enrollment typically takes around 4 weeks, and Ethoca and Verifi don't notify us when your SE numbers are enrolled.
If you want both AmEx and Discover, send this to your payment processor
The simplest way to get both numbers is to ask your payment processor's support team to retrieve them for you. Copy, paste, and send them this message:
Hey, I'd like to add extra American Express and Discover coverage for my Ethoca alerts through my third-party provider, Chargeback.io. Could you please escalate this to the right department so they can get me my AmEx SE number and Discover SE number as soon as possible? Thank you very much, and let me know if you need anything else from my end.
If you only want one of them, just delete the SE number you don't need from the message before you send it.
To expand your coverage for American Express (AmEx) and Discover chargeback alerts, gather the following information:
Legal business name
Merchant name as used on the business account
Full physical address of your registered business
AmEx SE number (also known as Merchant Number): 10 digits long.
Discover SE number: 15 digits long and starts with 6.
To be enrolled in American Express alerts, you must have processed at least a single successful American Express transaction on your payment processor within the last 90 days.
Once You Have the Required Information
Once you've collected all of the above information, sign up for expanded AmEx and Discover coverage with the button below:
How to Find Your SE Numbers
If your payment processor's support can't retrieve your SE numbers for you, here's how to find each one.
1. AmEx SE Number
Ethoca can't map AmEx numbers retrieved from most payment processors, because many payment processors share a single AmEx Merchant ID across many accounts to save costs.
In this case, the only way to retrieve your AmEx SE Number is to get it directly from American Express. To get your SE Number, you must have at least one American Express transaction.
If you have more than one 'Establishment', AmEx may assign more than one SE Number. In this context, AmEx refers to 'Establishments' as each of your websites and all other points of sale.
Here's a link to AmEx's contact page.
⚠️ Shopify Payments merchants: Shopify Payments most often won't work for AmEx and Discover, because Shopify doesn't give its merchants an SE number. Please be aware that this is often a bit of a headache, and it frequently fails for Shopify merchants for this reason.
2. Discover SE Number
Your Discover SE number is 15 digits long and starts with 6. Unlike AmEx, you almost never need to contact Discover directly to get it. Your payment processor assigns this number to your account when your merchant account is set up, so your processor is the one who can give it to you.
The support message above already asks your payment processor for it, so in most cases you don't need to do anything else.
If you'd rather find it yourself, look on your VAR sheet. This is the merchant account details sheet your payment processor sent you when your account was approved, and it lists your SE and MID numbers for each card network.
💬 Still need help? Contact Chargeback.io support.