As it happens, my own businesses sometimes will choose to refund under those circumstances. It does cost us a small amount every time we do it, because we still

As it happens, my own businesses sometimes will choose to refund under those circumstances. It does cost us a small amount every time we do it, because we still had to have resources available to provide the agreed service even if our customer decided not to use it. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do that, either ethically or legally, and I don't see why it should ever be a card company's decision rather than ours. The job of any payment service is to collect payment from a customer and give it to the merchant. It's already bad enough with chargebacks, which as any merchant can tell you are sometimes abused with the merchant losing out through no fault of their own. The idea that there should be a normal, advertised mechanism through which card companies would retrospectively pull back money paid by the customer under a legitimate contract is legally nonsensical.