> to line the pockets of the credit card duopoly and ensure the merchant always gets screwed. First, in the US there are four companies, not two (or three, if

> to line the pockets of the credit card duopoly and ensure the merchant always gets screwed. First, in the US there are four companies, not two (or three, if you don't want to count Discover). And chargebacks aren't the reason that there are so few players - they're far from the biggest barrier to entry for an upstart, aspiring credit card provider. > In many developed countries there are consumer protection laws which entitle the buyer to Replacement, Repair, Refund (in that order usually), so a merchant not adhering to these laws could endup in serious legal trouble as is. That's not what chargebacks are generally for, and in fact using a chargeback for any of those three things is oftentimes considered misuse of the chargeback system. Chargebacks are for handling disputes regarding the actual goods or services promised or rendered. Furthermore, having laws in place means nothing if it's prohibitively expensive for consumers to actually get them to be enforced in all but the largest disputes. Chargebacks are a tool that consumers can (and do) use to ensure that merchants adhere to these agreements. No individual is going to go to court with a merchant over a few hundred dollars on a disputed credit card charge. The consumer delegates this authority to the credit card company, who is more than happy to aggregate this risk across multiple customers, in exchange for a cut[0]. This is not a problem; it is the system working as intended! I'm saying this both as a consumer and as a merchant who has gotten screwed over by one of the four (not two) major credit card companies[1] - chargebacks suck, but they provide an essential protection for consumers that the judicial system cannot. (All of this is separate from fraud, which is a different matter entirely.) > I forgot the last time I had to use a credit card (or paypal and their "consumer protection") in the last year, and my life both personal and business is easier and better for it. I've had to make a few chargebacks in my life. The largest was for almost $2000. Even though the vendor was clearly in the wrong (and I had the written contract to prove it), it would have been way too expensive to actually try and get our money back through the judicial system. Fortunately, my credit card company was more than happy to settle the matter for us. [0] The consumer doesn't pay for this service directly, but they do indirectly (which isn't fundamentally different from many other products and services, in which the actual cashflow is invisible to the end consumer - this can be problematic in its own right, but that's a separate matter of discussion). [1] I have plenty of chargeback horror stories as a merchant, but that's the topic of another post. And that doesn't mean I don't see the value in chargebacks in general.