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Please don't do this. I get customers doing this for Twiddla every few months despite sending monthly receipt mails explaining how I'm happy to cancel their se
by jasonkester 8y ago
Please don't do this.
I get customers doing this for Twiddla every few months despite sending monthly receipt mails explaining how I'm happy to cancel their service and even refund as many months of it as they like if they're not happy for any reason.
But no. Some people would rather call their bank and accuse me of fraud than reply to a mail (or click a prominent link on their account page).
No amount of reaching out to ask them to cancel a chargeback has ever worked. It's baffling. Sure, it's a (way more complicated) way of cancelling your subscription. But it affects my ability to run my business.
So yeah. Don't do this until you at least try clicking the cancel button on the website.
- bemmu 8y agoThose customer might be using leaked card numbers? The person who contacted the bank might have been the real owner of the card instead of the person who signed up for Twiddla.
- gnicholas 8y agoThis is possible, but in my experience this has never come up. Most of the time, a subscriber will indicate that they weren't expecting a charge, and it will be categorized as an unrecognized charge and I'll have to prove (to Stripe) that the customer signed up for this subscription. But if the subscriber indicates that they think it's fraud, it's always been the case that they think it's fraudulent to have a subscription or some such thing — never that someone took their credit card and signed up for my service. The worst incident was where a subscriber accurately described what happened — that he didn't remember it would be a renewing charge — and his credit card company insisted on categorizing it as fraud, even though he explicitly said not to. When a charge is categorized as fraud, Stripe makes you prove all sorts of things that are totally irrelevant where fraud/identity theft have not happened. I think they even asked me to provide a photocopy of the subscriber's driver's license. So it's a real bummer when people flag transactions instead of taking a second to cancel their subscription.
- thecatspaw 8y agoIf its a legit subscription which is easy to cancel online, then I agree, its not nice to issue a chargeback for that. However, if a company abuses darkpatterns to keep you from canceling (by making you wait half an hour in a _call_ for a service you trialed with a few clicks..), I have no issue with chargebacks.
- sokoloff 8y agoWe tried BlueApron and enjoyed it for the better part of a year. Easy sign-up, impossible to cancel online. Out of sheer spite for this dark pattern, I went onto their site every week (via a paid search click) for over two years to cancel the next few shipments until they re-activated their (already existing, but not navigable) online cancelation form.
- ec109685 8y agoGoogle at least only charges the advertiser the first time you click on one of their sponsored links.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThe real bummer is that subscriptions aren’t centralised. Unless the user subscribes through something like iTunes or PayPal, where canceling a subscription is user-centric. The lesson here is: payment card providers need to get with the program and add a new category of charge-cancellation, specifically: user no longer wishes to continue with service, most recent charge reversed and further charges for this service blocked.
- jasonkester 8y agoCareful what you wish for. I used to use Amazon DevPay for S3stat and Twiddla subscriptions. It's "user-centric" like you describe, where users sign up for to pay for the service through Amazon, and can later tell Amazon to stop paying for it. My thing would get webhooks when those things happened so I could update my end. But it was only user-centric, so if the user asked me to cancel their subscription, I couldn't do anything except give them a link to Amazon's page to cancel. I could have a Cancel button on my site to stop my end of things, but I had to give them a link and tell them not to forget to go over to this other site and perform the necessary steps to stop sending me money. As you can imagine, it was not optimal. I ended up on the phone with Amazon too many times begging them to please stop charging my customer money and sending it to me because neither of us want that to happen, and listening to Amazon explaining patiently that that is not something they can do. No sir, write back to your customer and tell them to re-activate their Amazon subscription then visit this page and click this series of links. Stripe couldn't arrive fast enough. The day it did, my business was gone. ... and 5 years later I still had hundreds of customers who had signed up using Amazon DevPay, which doesn't have a way of transferring payment details (again, because "user-centric"), so every one of them ended up with the same professionally-embarrassing email exchange asking them to go to a 3rd party website and perform some complicated tasks that we weren't able to perform on their behalf. And sorry.
- krageon 8y agoIf every other business has taught them that this is the only way to deal with things and that actually going through the "official" cancellation procedure is next to impossible (and an opportunity cost besides), I don't see how you can ask them to stop doing it. It's apparently a strategy that works, and just because it's inconvenient for you doesn't make it their obligation to stop.
- scrollaway 8y agoThere's a just middle ground. If a service provides excellent unsubscribe flow and refund options, is it a good idea to reward them by accusing them of fraud? Do it for the shitty services but at least do some basic homework first.
- chii 8y agoAgreed : as a customer, you'd have to at least tried to call or cancel before issuing a charge back.
- lanterk 8y agoThe website should have a very accessible cancel option. Especially considering calling tends to entail reps trying to push you to keep the account, and not everyone is comfortable having to give a reason for cancellation.
- pfranz 8y agoThe problem is they've been trained not to bother. For years I had small subscriptions to various digital things; public radio, podcasts, etc. After being burned when trying to change my credit card on a prominent broadcaster and finding there was no obvious way to cancel, I switched to PayPal or nothing for ongoing payments. It's just not worth bothering managing each site's various levels of hostility for dealing with it. After PayPal had some gaffes, I stopped altogether. In the years since I've moved a few to Patreon, but fewer than previously.
- Silhouette 8y ago
- swebs 8y agoWell from the user's perspective, it does seem a lot like fraud. You sign up for a free trial of a service just to try it out, end up not really liking it so you forget about it. A few months later you see on your credit card statement that you've been being billed for something you never even authorized. Now technically it is not fraud since it says in the fine print that you'll be billed automatically at the end of the trial. But we all know people don't read the fine print.
- jasonkester 8y agoFor what it's worth the service we're talking about does not ask for a credit card during the trial. After your 30 days, you need to come back and add your card details to activate your subscription. Thus the frustration of watching people who have done that come back a few months later and charging back all 3 months of service.
- wccrawford 8y agoThen you're talking about a different thing. Your "fraud!" customers are people who have actively chosen to pay for your service, then actively chosen to claim fraud and get their money back. Everyone else is talking about people who were forced to put a CC on a free trial and then were automatically charged for a service they either forgot to cancel or couldn't cancel through the channels. (Or decided not to bother with the channels since they're almost always a pain in the ass.) It's a different situation entirely.
- dhimes 8y agoIs this something a competitor might do?
- nkrisc 8y agoSounds like they're trying to defraud you, not just cancel their service.
- jasonkester 8y agoThe irony is that I do in fact offer multi-month refunds for Twiddla subscribers who "forgot to cancel". All they have to do is ask. I actually just processed one of these this morning, refunding 5 months worth of payments for a user. Just because they asked.
- floatingatoll 8y agoNote that there’s an intermediate option, where you instruct the card issuer simply to deny future charges from the merchant. It doesn’t file a chargeback and it prevents new charges.
- hmmYeahNah 8y agoOh, I absolutely will do this as hard as I can, as frequently as possible. I think you’d prefer it as a better alternative to me snapping and finding a reason to lash out in some other way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mattbee 8y agoPeople see cancellation and asking for refunds as an awkward conversation. Calling a bank is easier, and Amex / other providers have buttons online to say "stop charges" or "dispute charges" - easier still, and they know where to find it. (I just had one service I'd trialled & forgotten about ask me to arrange a ... VIDEO CHAT to cancel runs screaming) But also - if that's what customers are doing, your cancellation button probably isn't as obvious or findable as you'd think (or people lose their passwords). And if you're a small SaaS shop, you probably don't have the time or energy to workshop the whole cancellation experience :) idk, there's no right answer but "baffling" customer behaviour is always an opportunity to improve what you're offering.
- criddell 8y agoThat's a really good point. Some companies have pretty aggressive customer retention tactics. I've learned that when they ask why I'm canceling I just say "it's personal" and most of the time they let me go. But other times, they don't and it's very annoying.
- Consultant32452 8y agoJust tell them something insane, like unfortunately you're dead, or you've gone deaf, blind, and mute in spite of the fact you're talking to them in the phone.
- tekromancr 8y agoUgh, It's like Planet Fitness' retention strategies. They make you go into the gym that you signed up at, get a form, fill it out, then MAIL it to corporate. When I tried to do that, they told me "Oh, we don't have any of the forms on hand, try again next week" Fuuuuuuck that a whole bunch. They also make you do direct debit from your bank to sign up rather then put it on a ccard, to make it more difficult to just stop paying them. I only stopped giving them money when my bank (simple) changed their upstream bank and everyone got a new account number.
- LorenPechtel 8y ago
- aasasd 8y agoSounds like there's an unexplored opportunity for banks/cc companies and service providers to implement an integration API standard where the client could cancel the service through any of the parties. Not that it's in the interest of too many providers, though.
- some_random 8y agoIf there's a button to cancel on a website, then yeah that's how you should cancel a subscription. But many business let you sign up through their website, but make you call them to cancel. They deserve to get nailed with a chargeback, it's a hell of a lot easier than calling.
- dazc 8y agoIsn't this just the same as people reporting your promotional emails as spam rather than clicking the unsubscribe link though? As others have pointed out, it's likely nothing personal against you or your company but rather just learned behaviour after dealing with rogue elements - which is/has been most other businesses to date.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoThen, you're a outlier jasonkester. Many companies I've dealt with have the "click button to sign up", but the cancel procedure is "need to call during the 3'rd minute of the eclipse while sitting in a salt circle". This has been endemic at all levels of recurring commerce. And gyms have been notorious for being damned near impossible to cancel, to the point of massive class action lawsuits. Simply put, I'm willing to expend the same amount of energy to sign up as I do to quit a service. Past that, I'm reporting billing fraud, and I'll switch CC's if need be. Sorry if you're doing it right, but 99% of businesses that do it do it badly.
- ensignavenger 8y agoI would never process a charge back in this situation- I always try to contact the merchant by reasonable means first. Further, the last few times I have had to deal with fraudulent charges, my banks has always asked if I had attempted to contact the merchant- in one case they even called with me to insist that the merchant refund me (Having my bank on the line let them know I was serious about doing a charge back if they refused to cooperate- they cooperated). What the OP describes though was a merchant making it difficult to contact them. I think in the case where the merchant insists on you calling them and fails to answer their phone, a charge back is warranted.
- LorenPechtel 8y agoI just went through a compromised card. The bank alerted me as they considered the transactions suspect. They didn't even ask if I tried to contact the merchants. I denied making them (they were in a city I haven't been in in almost 40 years) and that was that.
- ensignavenger 8y agoWhen the bank flags it as a possible compromise, they probably don't. Different banks probably have different procedures, but when my wife's debit card was compromised recently, they asked her if she had contacted the merchant- she had not, as she didn't even know who they were. After she explained that, they proceeded to process her claim, but they did check.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoI’m not talking about a chargeback, I’m talking about blocking future charges for a service I’ve already tried to cancel, and run up against unreasonable resistance. There are no accusations of fraud involved. I agree that chargebacks should be used for fraud only, but if you inform a company that you’ve tried to cancel and are done with their service, that you will stop payments after a given date... the rest is very much their problem. Let’s stop conflating this with chargebacks after using a service for the billed period ok?
- nrb 8y agoNord VPN handles this in a somewhat unique way among the subscription services I use. They send out an automated email 3 days before they charge for the next month. This seems like a sensible middle ground to me given the lack of infrastructure for services to notify card issuers of their intent to charge.