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But this isn't the product I want. I don't want to ever fight chargebacks. Because my policy is to never take money from people who don't want to give it to m

But this isn't the product I want. I don't want to ever fight chargebacks. Because my policy is to never take money from people who don't want to give it to me. I want to automatically refund every chargeback attempt without it affecting my ability to charge credit cards. One of my businesses targets consumers, who have this amazing ability to "forget to cancel" or to have "cancelled 3 months ago, but for some reason we're still billing them" or to just plain decide that the last six months of charges were fraudulent and that their bank should get them reversed. All of that is fine with me, and in fact every invoice I send out says as much: We'll happily refund every penny you ever paid us if you simply ask. But lots of people aren't comfortable asking for their money back. They are, however, plenty comfortable asking their bank to ask for their money back. I just want a way to streamline that process that doesn't involve me having to handle fighting disputes that I'd prefer to lose. And of course to not have those lost "disputes" count against me. Any ideas on how to do that, Stripe?

Implicated 7y ago
Why isn't this a feature of _every_ merchant account?
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
But lots of people aren't comfortable asking for their money back. They are, however, plenty comfortable asking their bank to ask for their money back. I think you are being generous in your interpretation. I don't get many chargebacks but looking at the ones I've had there has been a lot of deceit and fraudulent behaviour.
- jasonkester 7y ago
  Do you mean it's your customers who are being deceitful by charging back a service after they've used it (as mine do). Or do you mean that you have customers using stolen credit cards to pay for your service and that the chargebacks are happening when the card owner discovers as much? I haven't seen any evidence of that second case happening with my users (apart from one incident where card thieves discovered my "update your credit card" workflow and used it to sanitize numbers for a few days before I fixed the loophole). But the first one happens all the time. It'd be adorable in a way, as I'm sure the people doing it think they're totally getting away with something. If, that is, it didn't jeopardize my ability to continue charging credit cards in the future.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The first except they continue to use the software after they have done the chargeback. Also expense fraud, the buyer purchases on their credit card, makes a claim with their employer then does a chargeback to get a refund. I also get a lot of people buying a single license and using it on multiple computers but that's really a different issue.
scarface74 7y ago
Would you feel that way if you were selling physical goods or even services where you had to pay workers - like a lawn business? It sounds like you are selling a near zero marginal cost software business.
- jasonkester 7y ago
  I do have server expenses that map directly to processing work done for individual customers, so there is a quantifiable amount of real money lost at times. But at the end of the day, I still don't want somebody's fourteen dollars enough to fight them for it (even if it means I also lose another $5 in real expense and a few more in chargeback fees). But you're absolutely right. If it were physical goods or services, I'd fight those chargebacks for sure. (Though it'd be a lot harder for one of my deadbeat customers to plausibly claim that he'd "forgot that I mowed his lawn").
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    Once a chargeback is filed you are losing the fee if you either accept it or don't fight it. My cancellation process is simple, certainly simpler than contacting your bank and identifying yourself and going through the chargeback process. That doesn't stop people from going to their bank for the last 3 months of subscription and calling them fraudulent because they never told us to cancel them. I fight every single chargeback because their always lies by the customer in my case and they involve real money already spent by my company. We win some and lose some.
- aparks517 7y ago
  Not sure about OP’s costs, but I sell physical goods and have a similar attitude: I don’t want money from anyone who’s not delighted to give it to me. Most people are good most of the time and it works out fine. I have had a couple of obvious scammers take advantage, but that’s on them to square with their conscience. Life’s too short to spend it fussing with folks like that.
  - scarface74 7y ago
eeke 7y ago
We can send you a webhook on every dispute being created (https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks) and you could use the API to either refund the underlying charge or accept the dispute (and refund the underlying charge). We can also give you access to receiving early fraud warnings from issuers (like Visa TC40s). These are notifications from the issuers that the customer is likely going to dispute a charge. If you're happy proactively refunding customers you could do so without incurring the dispute fee (though TC40s and the MasterCard equivalent can still count towards monitoring programs). Let me know if you're interested (eeke@stripe.com). This gets you most of what you want. The subtleties: 1) The credit card ecosystem wants to discourage chargebacks as a routine mechanism for canceling, and so there will still be a fee assessed by the networks and hence by us. 2) The credit card networks have thresholds for how many chargebacks a customer can be doing while making responsible use of their rails, and if one routinely exceeds that, they will give a very serious warning to change business practices and, if one’s numbers do not improve, they will terminate one’s access to the rails. We have substantial experience with B2B SaaS businesses and it is _extraordinarily_ unlikely that a B2B SaaS business comes close to those thresholds, even after accounting for unfortunate user behavior.
- jasonkester 7y ago
  How does that work? When I'm notified of a dispute, the first thing I do is go in and refund the charge. I still have to watch the whole dispute resolution process play out and have it be ruled against me. How would I go about stopping it before it starts, as you seem to imply is possible? Edit to add: Does it even make a difference if I go in and refund the disputed payments? It sounds like I get dinged either way and the customer gets their money back either way. Should I save myself the effort?
  - MichaelApproved 7y ago
    Doesn't sound like they're implying that it's possible. Sounds like they're allowing you to automate the dispute process but it'll still be a negative mark on your account. Side note, are you getting anywhere near the number of disputes for this to matter to you? Seems like you have good refund policies and you'd probably be below the threshold for account termination.
ysavir 7y ago
Stripe can do refunds through their API, so there's nothing stopping you from building this feature into your own business, on your own site, with your own branding and wording, etc. I would look at Steam's refund flow for inspiration.
- ddebernardy 7y ago
  That's different from what OP's point is. Dealing with refund requests is easy. The problem is customers who request chargebacks from their banks instead of requesting refunds from you. Payment providers usually contest such chargebacks automatically. This ends up costing you a fee. And if you lose the dispute, or issue a refund as a matter of course, these chargebacks contribute to lowering your account's reputation. If this gets out of hands it can put your ability to receive payments in jeopardy. What would be much more ideal is that, when the bank signals that one of its customers is contesting a charge, the payment provider would simply refund the charge without questions. And, assuming refunds (and chargebacks) are the exception rather than the rule, without the process lowering your score.
  - luka-birsa 7y ago
    Ideal for a company that has near infinite markup on the goods (eg. SaaS business with very good unit economics). As somebody that processes a lot of payments for physical goods (electronic devices) the preference is not as clear cut. You ship out the goods in the COGS value of couple K of USD just to get the chargeback. We've ended up adding additional heuristics to mark the fishy payments and manual checking before shipping out. Something like Stripe Chargeback protection actually makes sense and I'll ask my team to look into the ratio of chargebacks to see if it makes sense to migrate from Braintree just because of this.
    - ddebernardy 7y ago
      No quibble there. Stripe Chargeback makes good sense indeed in your scenario.
wayoutthere 7y ago
Unless you have an easily visible telephone support number, I’m issuing a chargeback. It simply takes less of my time and idgaf about your business model.
- jasonkester 7y ago
  Isn't that harder than replying to your last invoice mail with the words "Please refund this and cancel my subscription"? Why involve the telephone?
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    I think many people have been conditioned to assume that replying to automated messages goes straight to /dev/null. Have you considered putting a link to a page that provides a quick cancellation workflow?
    - jasonkester 7y ago
      Here's one of those invoice mails in its entirety. Sent from (and reply-to) info@twiddla.com. See if you can figure out how to go about cancelling your subscription or getting a refund: Your Twiddla Bill for April 4, 2019 to May 4, 2019 Hey, we wanted to let you know that on May 4, 2019 we charged your credit card $14.00 for your monthly Twiddla Pro subscription. You can find additional information regarding your bill, individual charges, and your account history by logging into your your account at https://www.twiddla.com/ https://www.twiddla.com/ and navigating to your "My Account" page. You can also make changes to your subscription or cancel it altogether from that page. If you have any questions regarding this charge, or would like to yell at us until we refund it, please contact us at info@twiddla.com. Thanks for the business! Jason Kester info@twiddla.com https://www.twiddla.com/ https://www.twiddla.com/
      - ensignavenger 7y ago
        I have no desire to yell at you, simply to cancel the account and request a refund. While sending an email is okay, it would be better if there was a link directly to a page to do so, just like unsubscribing from an email list. Regardless, I would recommend changing the wording from "yell" because that sounds hostile, and most people don't want the conflict.
peteretep 7y ago
> to have "cancelled 3 months ago, but for some reason we're still billing them" or to just plain decide that the last six months of charges were fraudulent I've had both of these things happen as a consumer. Coschedule kept billing me for six months after I cancelled (and my accounts administrator didn't know we'd cancelled), and I had Experian in the UK continue billing me for six months after they'd disabled my account but hadn't told me. In the former case, they refunded it straight away once I pointed it out, and in the latter I had to escalate a little, and start talking about a small claims court, but they refunded it in the end. I guess my point is, both of these are valid consumer complaints, and waving them away as being stupid consumers probably isn't that useful for anyone. Further down, in another comment, you imply that this is deceit / fraud.
- jasonkester 7y ago
  I do have the occasional customer claim to have "cancelled 3 months ago" via email. We keep good records of such things, so we know him to be mistaken but I always make a point of apologizing and issuing an immediate refund. I word my "Why did you open a chargeback" mails the same way, and offer to handle things via a refund (and to please close the dispute because it affects our business). But the people who use their credit card company instead of email or the prominent Cancel button on the website don't tend to ever respond to those mails. It's frustrating, because so many people have had to deal with health clubs and Comcast that they just assume every business will fight against them if they want to cancel.
  - peteretep 7y ago
    > We keep good records of such things, so we know him to be mistaken I assume Coschedule also believe they keep good records of such things, and indeed when they checked those records, they found I had cancelled when I said I did, but they'd continued to bill me anyway. You are truly exceptional to run a business where mistakes never happen, and when they do, they are always the customer's fault.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    But the people who use their credit card company instead of email or the prominent Cancel button on the website don't tend to ever respond to those mails. What's the user experience for someone whose credit card details have been stolen and used to sign up for your service? Presumably such a person wouldn't have the credentials, the e-mail, or the cancel button?
Spooky23 7y ago
Keep in mind that making it easy to terminate subscriptions eliminates most of those chargebacks. It’s one of the reasons that I use Apple whenever possible to handle recurring subscriptions. It takes about 10m to file a dispute with American Express. If figuring out how to cancel a subscription takes longer, I’m cutting my losses at 10m and heading to Amex.com. Perhaps industry standards around subscription management would help? I think there is a lot of real fraud/unethical behavior exists in this space and legitimate retention management can easily cross the line in the consumers mind as scammy.
- wbl 7y ago
  There is no legitimate retention management. If I want to cancel I've made clear what I want to do. Making it take longer then a few minutes is a waste of all our time.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    There is a fine line in my POV. Word trickery and playing games with buttons is over the line. I think it is ok to say “Hey, you’re paying $20/mo for the super plan, and don’t use feature X, but can do the middle plan for $12”. I think it’s ok to make sure that people understand that data is deleted if they take the action. But it’s easy to drift into dark patterns.
- Glyptodon 7y ago
  One of the reasons I left my first job out of college is that management wanted the cancel subscription button on our website replaced with a phone number.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  The other side of this is that there are some customers who can't manage to cancel a subscription even when they literally just have to log in, click/tap to go to whatever page handles their personal details, and then push a prominent button to cancel and maybe a second confirmation one to prevent misclicks. The entire process can take less than 10s, yet you'll still get people who email you claiming they can't find it and have been looking forever and now they'd like a refund for their last six months of payments please. Remarkably, although they have trying to cancel for months and have looked everywhere, some of these people have no entry in your logs showing them visiting any of the personal settings pages on your system, nor is there any record of any previous attempt to contact you via any of the five different methods you advertise prominently for customer support... Now, we're generally fairly relaxed about subscriptions. We very much take the view that it's not worth quibbling over the odd month's payment and we'd rather offer good customer service and build a good reputation. For example, maybe someone seems to have made an honest mistake but we believe they really did intend to cancel and they haven't used our services since, and in that sort of situation we tend to just refund them anyway if they ask. However, cancelling a payment authority or charging a payment back retrospectively is not a substitute for cancelling a legal agreement, and in some cases it also hurts us. If someone deliberately messes us around like that, we are much less sympathetic, and we certainly consider whether to pursue them through legal means to recover what they owed us and any other damages and costs.
GarrisonPrime 7y ago
You might feel differently if you wasted a whole week on a service, only to get scammed and left with less than nothing and a bad reputation with your bank. I’ll agree that what you want maybe best for some forms of business, but what are you looking for here? A fundamental change to the credit card system? Stripe isn’t going to make it not count against you, because the card companies are certainly holding it against Stripe. So unless you convince Visa and MasterCard to change their way of doing business, I’m not sure you’ll get what you want.
homero 7y ago
There's chargeback services who pay banks to tell them first so you get a chance to respond before it hits your merchant account. This will let you refund and pay less fees at the merchant account level. I've used https://chargeback.com/ https://chargeback.com/
NKCSS 7y ago
Longshot, but you don't happen to be th3j35t3r, do you? The name and description on ExpatSoftware seems so fitting :)
- ryanlol 7y ago
  It’s not very polite to suggest that someone might be th3j35t3r.
curiousgeorgio 7y ago
> We'll happily refund every penny you ever paid us if you simply ask. I'm all for giving customers the benefit of the doubt (and I'm definitely generous in giving refunds too), but doesn't this policy go a bit too far? Even if your costs are near zero, I find it somewhat unethical to say "yes, I have proof that you used my service and received the value I promised to provide... and yet the contract of the sale (implied or explicit) - past or present - is effectively nullified at your request at any time". While it often doesn't make sense to chase after money from customers who make these kinds of requests, it also feels wrong (to me) to encourage that kind of consumer behavior. The retroactive part seems especially ripe for abuse from customers who decide to switch to a competitor, making their switching cost effectively negative (they're incentivized to leave you). Yes - on the whole, people are usually honest and respectable. But in my experience, a surprising number of those same people value saving a few bucks over a clean conscience.
jopsen 7y ago
Let's assume you're running a scam (thought experiment). If it was possible to refund anybody who complained and not have the complaint affect your ability to charge credit cards, then wouldn't every scammer do this? I think it's fair to assume that few people will notice a fraudulent charge, and much less bother to dispute it. If you charge money you don't feel like you need to charge -- then simply don't charge it :) For a subscription simply ask inactive users to sign-in and confirm that they wish to maintain their subscription.
manuelhuez 7y ago
I don't think that's something available on Stripe, but there are a few tools available in the payments processing ecosystem that allows you to do just that: "notifications of fraud" and "requests for information". Basically, the first is a notification triggered during the chargeback initialization process on the bank, but before the chargeback is actually processed. So when you receive the notification, you can still issue refunds, cancelling out the incoming chargeback. The second is similar, but is at an even earlier step of the chargeback process where the user simply asks its bank some information about a line on their statement they don't recognize.
quelltext 7y ago
> I want to automatically refund every chargeback attempt without it affecting my ability to charge credit cards. That is just not how chargebacks work, sorry. I do think there is merrit to urge issuers and card brands to change the chargeback behaviour or rules, i.e. to always give the merchant the opportunity to refund first. Essentially to make the retrievals or inquiries flow mandatory for all disputes. There you are given the opportunity to refund and respond before escalation. Stripe and others cannot do much here except for lobbying.
deleted 7y ago
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the_shalashaska 7y ago
But, this is the product I want, because I sell high end used luxury watches, and chargebacks are the biggest PITA and one of the hindrances to profitable growth in that sector. Losing out on a large chunk of a $15k transaction because the buyer thinks the condition of the watch is "not as described" (where in reality, they know this is an easy way to scrape a huge discount on their purchase because the criteria is so subjective and petty) makes life very difficult. Sure, 95% of my customers are great, but that 5% really deals material damage when you are talking about high cost physical goods. This product offering is interesting, and is worth investigating and weighing its cost against my average annual losses from chargebacks. In your case, you are offering SaaS so your marginal cost must be negligible. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
- fengloincloth 7y ago
  Keep in mind that the protection seems to only covers certain types of disputes: https://support.stripe.com/questions/payments-that-qualify-for-chargeback-protection https://support.stripe.com/questions/payments-that-qualify-f... For instance "product not received" , "product unacceptable", or "subscription canceled" would not be covered.
- shamir 7y ago
  Would you be willing to offer a discount, say 5%, to customers who made an irrevocable payment? No chargebacks guaranteed.
trimbo 7y ago
> We'll happily refund every penny you ever paid us if you simply ask IANACFO, but I think your balance sheet for this business is going to be pretty wack. To guarantee this, you need to keep a pool for refunds (edit: and with your specific guarantee, isn't it all revenue ever?). If you don't, that can be a real issue with the business. This happened at Groupon: https://www.cfo.com/management-accounting/2012/04/groupon-restatement-raises-reserving-questions/ https://www.cfo.com/management-accounting/2012/04/groupon-re...
- laughinghan 7y ago
  That article explicitly mentions "big ticket deals" at "higher price points" as the problem there. Many SaaS businesses charge each customer pretty small amounts and get very few chargebacks. The time it takes to fight a chargeback, even if illegitimate, isn't worth the amount of the charge itself, to say nothing of the opportunity cost of getting more customers who want to pay.
Thaxll 7y ago
You know that charge back costs you money right?
gingabriska 7y ago
But what if you've physical products where you already inoccured sufficient cost. What if someone buys from you again and again and chargeback each time?
camhart 7y ago
I'm in a similar boat.
nathan92 7y ago
If Stripe cant do this for you then I know a way you can. Give me a shout on nathan.watkins@axcessms.com

Implicated 7y ago

Why isn't this a feature of _every_ merchant account?

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

But lots of people aren't comfortable asking for their money back. They are, however, plenty comfortable asking their bank to ask for their money back. I think you are being generous in your interpretation. I don't get many chargebacks but looking at the ones I've had there has been a lot of deceit and fraudulent behaviour.

jasonkester 7y ago
Do you mean it's your customers who are being deceitful by charging back a service after they've used it (as mine do). Or do you mean that you have customers using stolen credit cards to pay for your service and that the chargebacks are happening when the card owner discovers as much? I haven't seen any evidence of that second case happening with my users (apart from one incident where card thieves discovered my "update your credit card" workflow and used it to sanitize numbers for a few days before I fixed the loophole). But the first one happens all the time. It'd be adorable in a way, as I'm sure the people doing it think they're totally getting away with something. If, that is, it didn't jeopardize my ability to continue charging credit cards in the future.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  The first except they continue to use the software after they have done the chargeback. Also expense fraud, the buyer purchases on their credit card, makes a claim with their employer then does a chargeback to get a refund. I also get a lot of people buying a single license and using it on multiple computers but that's really a different issue.

scarface74 7y ago

Would you feel that way if you were selling physical goods or even services where you had to pay workers - like a lawn business? It sounds like you are selling a near zero marginal cost software business.

jasonkester 7y ago
I do have server expenses that map directly to processing work done for individual customers, so there is a quantifiable amount of real money lost at times. But at the end of the day, I still don't want somebody's fourteen dollars enough to fight them for it (even if it means I also lose another $5 in real expense and a few more in chargeback fees). But you're absolutely right. If it were physical goods or services, I'd fight those chargebacks for sure. (Though it'd be a lot harder for one of my deadbeat customers to plausibly claim that he'd "forgot that I mowed his lawn").
- dexterdog 7y ago
  Once a chargeback is filed you are losing the fee if you either accept it or don't fight it. My cancellation process is simple, certainly simpler than contacting your bank and identifying yourself and going through the chargeback process. That doesn't stop people from going to their bank for the last 3 months of subscription and calling them fraudulent because they never told us to cancel them. I fight every single chargeback because their always lies by the customer in my case and they involve real money already spent by my company. We win some and lose some.
aparks517 7y ago
Not sure about OP’s costs, but I sell physical goods and have a similar attitude: I don’t want money from anyone who’s not delighted to give it to me. Most people are good most of the time and it works out fine. I have had a couple of obvious scammers take advantage, but that’s on them to square with their conscience. Life’s too short to spend it fussing with folks like that.
- scarface74 7y ago

eeke 7y ago

We can send you a webhook on every dispute being created (https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks) and you could use the API to either refund the underlying charge or accept the dispute (and refund the underlying charge). We can also give you access to receiving early fraud warnings from issuers (like Visa TC40s). These are notifications from the issuers that the customer is likely going to dispute a charge. If you're happy proactively refunding customers you could do so without incurring the dispute fee (though TC40s and the MasterCard equivalent can still count towards monitoring programs). Let me know if you're interested (eeke@stripe.com). This gets you most of what you want. The subtleties: 1) The credit card ecosystem wants to discourage chargebacks as a routine mechanism for canceling, and so there will still be a fee assessed by the networks and hence by us. 2) The credit card networks have thresholds for how many chargebacks a customer can be doing while making responsible use of their rails, and if one routinely exceeds that, they will give a very serious warning to change business practices and, if one’s numbers do not improve, they will terminate one’s access to the rails. We have substantial experience with B2B SaaS businesses and it is _extraordinarily_ unlikely that a B2B SaaS business comes close to those thresholds, even after accounting for unfortunate user behavior.

jasonkester 7y ago
How does that work? When I'm notified of a dispute, the first thing I do is go in and refund the charge. I still have to watch the whole dispute resolution process play out and have it be ruled against me. How would I go about stopping it before it starts, as you seem to imply is possible? Edit to add: Does it even make a difference if I go in and refund the disputed payments? It sounds like I get dinged either way and the customer gets their money back either way. Should I save myself the effort?
- MichaelApproved 7y ago
  Doesn't sound like they're implying that it's possible. Sounds like they're allowing you to automate the dispute process but it'll still be a negative mark on your account. Side note, are you getting anywhere near the number of disputes for this to matter to you? Seems like you have good refund policies and you'd probably be below the threshold for account termination.

ysavir 7y ago

Stripe can do refunds through their API, so there's nothing stopping you from building this feature into your own business, on your own site, with your own branding and wording, etc. I would look at Steam's refund flow for inspiration.

ddebernardy 7y ago
That's different from what OP's point is. Dealing with refund requests is easy. The problem is customers who request chargebacks from their banks instead of requesting refunds from you. Payment providers usually contest such chargebacks automatically. This ends up costing you a fee. And if you lose the dispute, or issue a refund as a matter of course, these chargebacks contribute to lowering your account's reputation. If this gets out of hands it can put your ability to receive payments in jeopardy. What would be much more ideal is that, when the bank signals that one of its customers is contesting a charge, the payment provider would simply refund the charge without questions. And, assuming refunds (and chargebacks) are the exception rather than the rule, without the process lowering your score.
- luka-birsa 7y ago
  Ideal for a company that has near infinite markup on the goods (eg. SaaS business with very good unit economics). As somebody that processes a lot of payments for physical goods (electronic devices) the preference is not as clear cut. You ship out the goods in the COGS value of couple K of USD just to get the chargeback. We've ended up adding additional heuristics to mark the fishy payments and manual checking before shipping out. Something like Stripe Chargeback protection actually makes sense and I'll ask my team to look into the ratio of chargebacks to see if it makes sense to migrate from Braintree just because of this.
  - ddebernardy 7y ago
    No quibble there. Stripe Chargeback makes good sense indeed in your scenario.

wayoutthere 7y ago

Unless you have an easily visible telephone support number, I’m issuing a chargeback. It simply takes less of my time and idgaf about your business model.

jasonkester 7y ago
Isn't that harder than replying to your last invoice mail with the words "Please refund this and cancel my subscription"? Why involve the telephone?
- organsnyder 7y ago
  I think many people have been conditioned to assume that replying to automated messages goes straight to /dev/null. Have you considered putting a link to a page that provides a quick cancellation workflow?
  - jasonkester 7y ago
    Here's one of those invoice mails in its entirety. Sent from (and reply-to) info@twiddla.com. See if you can figure out how to go about cancelling your subscription or getting a refund: Your Twiddla Bill for April 4, 2019 to May 4, 2019 Hey, we wanted to let you know that on May 4, 2019 we charged your credit card $14.00 for your monthly Twiddla Pro subscription. You can find additional information regarding your bill, individual charges, and your account history by logging into your your account at https://www.twiddla.com/ https://www.twiddla.com/ and navigating to your "My Account" page. You can also make changes to your subscription or cancel it altogether from that page. If you have any questions regarding this charge, or would like to yell at us until we refund it, please contact us at info@twiddla.com. Thanks for the business! Jason Kester info@twiddla.com https://www.twiddla.com/ https://www.twiddla.com/
    - ensignavenger 7y ago
      I have no desire to yell at you, simply to cancel the account and request a refund. While sending an email is okay, it would be better if there was a link directly to a page to do so, just like unsubscribing from an email list. Regardless, I would recommend changing the wording from "yell" because that sounds hostile, and most people don't want the conflict.

peteretep 7y ago

> to have "cancelled 3 months ago, but for some reason we're still billing them" or to just plain decide that the last six months of charges were fraudulent I've had both of these things happen as a consumer. Coschedule kept billing me for six months after I cancelled (and my accounts administrator didn't know we'd cancelled), and I had Experian in the UK continue billing me for six months after they'd disabled my account but hadn't told me. In the former case, they refunded it straight away once I pointed it out, and in the latter I had to escalate a little, and start talking about a small claims court, but they refunded it in the end. I guess my point is, both of these are valid consumer complaints, and waving them away as being stupid consumers probably isn't that useful for anyone. Further down, in another comment, you imply that this is deceit / fraud.

jasonkester 7y ago
I do have the occasional customer claim to have "cancelled 3 months ago" via email. We keep good records of such things, so we know him to be mistaken but I always make a point of apologizing and issuing an immediate refund. I word my "Why did you open a chargeback" mails the same way, and offer to handle things via a refund (and to please close the dispute because it affects our business). But the people who use their credit card company instead of email or the prominent Cancel button on the website don't tend to ever respond to those mails. It's frustrating, because so many people have had to deal with health clubs and Comcast that they just assume every business will fight against them if they want to cancel.
- peteretep 7y ago
  > We keep good records of such things, so we know him to be mistaken I assume Coschedule also believe they keep good records of such things, and indeed when they checked those records, they found I had cancelled when I said I did, but they'd continued to bill me anyway. You are truly exceptional to run a business where mistakes never happen, and when they do, they are always the customer's fault.
- michaelt 7y ago
  But the people who use their credit card company instead of email or the prominent Cancel button on the website don't tend to ever respond to those mails. What's the user experience for someone whose credit card details have been stolen and used to sign up for your service? Presumably such a person wouldn't have the credentials, the e-mail, or the cancel button?

Spooky23 7y ago

Keep in mind that making it easy to terminate subscriptions eliminates most of those chargebacks. It’s one of the reasons that I use Apple whenever possible to handle recurring subscriptions. It takes about 10m to file a dispute with American Express. If figuring out how to cancel a subscription takes longer, I’m cutting my losses at 10m and heading to Amex.com. Perhaps industry standards around subscription management would help? I think there is a lot of real fraud/unethical behavior exists in this space and legitimate retention management can easily cross the line in the consumers mind as scammy.

wbl 7y ago
There is no legitimate retention management. If I want to cancel I've made clear what I want to do. Making it take longer then a few minutes is a waste of all our time.
- deleted 7y ago
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- Spooky23 7y ago
  There is a fine line in my POV. Word trickery and playing games with buttons is over the line. I think it is ok to say “Hey, you’re paying $20/mo for the super plan, and don’t use feature X, but can do the middle plan for $12”. I think it’s ok to make sure that people understand that data is deleted if they take the action. But it’s easy to drift into dark patterns.
Glyptodon 7y ago
One of the reasons I left my first job out of college is that management wanted the cancel subscription button on our website replaced with a phone number.
Silhouette 7y ago
The other side of this is that there are some customers who can't manage to cancel a subscription even when they literally just have to log in, click/tap to go to whatever page handles their personal details, and then push a prominent button to cancel and maybe a second confirmation one to prevent misclicks. The entire process can take less than 10s, yet you'll still get people who email you claiming they can't find it and have been looking forever and now they'd like a refund for their last six months of payments please. Remarkably, although they have trying to cancel for months and have looked everywhere, some of these people have no entry in your logs showing them visiting any of the personal settings pages on your system, nor is there any record of any previous attempt to contact you via any of the five different methods you advertise prominently for customer support... Now, we're generally fairly relaxed about subscriptions. We very much take the view that it's not worth quibbling over the odd month's payment and we'd rather offer good customer service and build a good reputation. For example, maybe someone seems to have made an honest mistake but we believe they really did intend to cancel and they haven't used our services since, and in that sort of situation we tend to just refund them anyway if they ask. However, cancelling a payment authority or charging a payment back retrospectively is not a substitute for cancelling a legal agreement, and in some cases it also hurts us. If someone deliberately messes us around like that, we are much less sympathetic, and we certainly consider whether to pursue them through legal means to recover what they owed us and any other damages and costs.

GarrisonPrime 7y ago

You might feel differently if you wasted a whole week on a service, only to get scammed and left with less than nothing and a bad reputation with your bank. I’ll agree that what you want maybe best for some forms of business, but what are you looking for here? A fundamental change to the credit card system? Stripe isn’t going to make it not count against you, because the card companies are certainly holding it against Stripe. So unless you convince Visa and MasterCard to change their way of doing business, I’m not sure you’ll get what you want.

homero 7y ago

There's chargeback services who pay banks to tell them first so you get a chance to respond before it hits your merchant account. This will let you refund and pay less fees at the merchant account level. I've used https://chargeback.com/ https://chargeback.com/

NKCSS 7y ago

Longshot, but you don't happen to be th3j35t3r, do you? The name and description on ExpatSoftware seems so fitting :)

ryanlol 7y ago
It’s not very polite to suggest that someone might be th3j35t3r.

curiousgeorgio 7y ago

> We'll happily refund every penny you ever paid us if you simply ask. I'm all for giving customers the benefit of the doubt (and I'm definitely generous in giving refunds too), but doesn't this policy go a bit too far? Even if your costs are near zero, I find it somewhat unethical to say "yes, I have proof that you used my service and received the value I promised to provide... and yet the contract of the sale (implied or explicit) - past or present - is effectively nullified at your request at any time". While it often doesn't make sense to chase after money from customers who make these kinds of requests, it also feels wrong (to me) to encourage that kind of consumer behavior. The retroactive part seems especially ripe for abuse from customers who decide to switch to a competitor, making their switching cost effectively negative (they're incentivized to leave you). Yes - on the whole, people are usually honest and respectable. But in my experience, a surprising number of those same people value saving a few bucks over a clean conscience.

jopsen 7y ago

Let's assume you're running a scam (thought experiment). If it was possible to refund anybody who complained and not have the complaint affect your ability to charge credit cards, then wouldn't every scammer do this? I think it's fair to assume that few people will notice a fraudulent charge, and much less bother to dispute it. If you charge money you don't feel like you need to charge -- then simply don't charge it :) For a subscription simply ask inactive users to sign-in and confirm that they wish to maintain their subscription.

manuelhuez 7y ago

I don't think that's something available on Stripe, but there are a few tools available in the payments processing ecosystem that allows you to do just that: "notifications of fraud" and "requests for information". Basically, the first is a notification triggered during the chargeback initialization process on the bank, but before the chargeback is actually processed. So when you receive the notification, you can still issue refunds, cancelling out the incoming chargeback. The second is similar, but is at an even earlier step of the chargeback process where the user simply asks its bank some information about a line on their statement they don't recognize.

quelltext 7y ago

> I want to automatically refund every chargeback attempt without it affecting my ability to charge credit cards. That is just not how chargebacks work, sorry. I do think there is merrit to urge issuers and card brands to change the chargeback behaviour or rules, i.e. to always give the merchant the opportunity to refund first. Essentially to make the retrievals or inquiries flow mandatory for all disputes. There you are given the opportunity to refund and respond before escalation. Stripe and others cannot do much here except for lobbying.

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the_shalashaska 7y ago

But, this is the product I want, because I sell high end used luxury watches, and chargebacks are the biggest PITA and one of the hindrances to profitable growth in that sector. Losing out on a large chunk of a $15k transaction because the buyer thinks the condition of the watch is "not as described" (where in reality, they know this is an easy way to scrape a huge discount on their purchase because the criteria is so subjective and petty) makes life very difficult. Sure, 95% of my customers are great, but that 5% really deals material damage when you are talking about high cost physical goods. This product offering is interesting, and is worth investigating and weighing its cost against my average annual losses from chargebacks. In your case, you are offering SaaS so your marginal cost must be negligible. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

fengloincloth 7y ago
Keep in mind that the protection seems to only covers certain types of disputes: https://support.stripe.com/questions/payments-that-qualify-for-chargeback-protection https://support.stripe.com/questions/payments-that-qualify-f... For instance "product not received" , "product unacceptable", or "subscription canceled" would not be covered.
shamir 7y ago
Would you be willing to offer a discount, say 5%, to customers who made an irrevocable payment? No chargebacks guaranteed.

trimbo 7y ago

> We'll happily refund every penny you ever paid us if you simply ask IANACFO, but I think your balance sheet for this business is going to be pretty wack. To guarantee this, you need to keep a pool for refunds (edit: and with your specific guarantee, isn't it all revenue ever?). If you don't, that can be a real issue with the business. This happened at Groupon: https://www.cfo.com/management-accounting/2012/04/groupon-restatement-raises-reserving-questions/ https://www.cfo.com/management-accounting/2012/04/groupon-re...

laughinghan 7y ago
That article explicitly mentions "big ticket deals" at "higher price points" as the problem there. Many SaaS businesses charge each customer pretty small amounts and get very few chargebacks. The time it takes to fight a chargeback, even if illegitimate, isn't worth the amount of the charge itself, to say nothing of the opportunity cost of getting more customers who want to pay.

Thaxll 7y ago

You know that charge back costs you money right?

gingabriska 7y ago

But what if you've physical products where you already inoccured sufficient cost. What if someone buys from you again and again and chargeback each time?

camhart 7y ago

I'm in a similar boat.

nathan92 7y ago

If Stripe cant do this for you then I know a way you can. Give me a shout on nathan.watkins@axcessms.com