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Those 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

by bemmu 8y ago

Those 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 ago
This 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    We 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 ago
      Google at least only charges the advertiser the first time you click on one of their sponsored links.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  The 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 ago
    Careful 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.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Yeah, that’s not ideal. The service provider needs to be able to cancel as well.
  - 8y ago

by bemmu 8y ago

Those 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 ago

This 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 ago
If 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 ago
  We 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 ago
    Google at least only charges the advertiser the first time you click on one of their sponsored links.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
The 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 ago
  Careful 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.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Yeah, that’s not ideal. The service provider needs to be able to cancel as well.
- 8y ago