Stripe Chargeback Protection

Don't know if anyone from Stripe is listening here but: it'd be amazing to be able to deploy chargeback protection selectively, as a Radar rule. So that for example we could say: charges from the US are protected (and subject to the extra fee) while charges from the UK are not.

Not an expert in this area, would'nt that flow against the general laws of insurance?

That’s exactly what we’d like. 95% of our transactions come from trusted customers which have ~0% chance of a chargeback. We’d like to apply this check and insurance on only the transactions that we are not sure about.

Requiring it to be all or nothing makes the feature useless (not cost effective) for merchants with a low fraud rates.

It'd still be enabled prior to the original charge being made. The details in the link suggest that some charges would be exempted anyway (eg ones that don't use the new Checkout, ones over a certain threshold). So it's a question of whether or not a given individual charge is insured, not a question of whether your Stripe account as a whole is insured.

Is it a 0% chance, or a 0.4% chance?

Thanks for the feedback! Our first priority at the moment is seeing how this performs and then rolling out additional integration options, but we might explore giving users additional control over the mechanics as time goes on.

It may not be cost effective for you, but your proposal doesn't seem cost effective for Stripe, either.

Is it not the point? If stripe allowed you to do that - insure only dangerous transactions - then it could not be 0.4% but rather a few %.

The entire point behind insurance is to have enough volume so that the small % when they need to pay up won't affect the business.

That's how insurance works: it relies on the majority of activity being fine and only a minority of it actually needing insurance. If you could select only the transactions with high risk to be insured, they'd have to charge a lot more than 0.4%.

I would imagine stripe will always block charges it thinks are likely to be disputed. They aren’t offering carte-blanche to accept transactions that are likely to be fraudulent.

Perhaps it wouldn't work for stripe (to allow the merchant pick and choose which transactions use this service). But if it doesn’t it means that the service won’t be used by clients with low fraud rates.

> If stripe allowed you to do that - insure only dangerous transactions - then it could not be 0.4% but rather a few %.

This would depend on how well stripe can detect fraud.

And if the price is higher to insure individual transactions, that still would be a nice/valuable service to have.

Insurance products are typically designed to make money for the provider. I'm sure they are doing a lot to lower risk.

Adverse selection inflates premiums, simply because people who need insurance are the ones who buy it.

The point of insurance is to transfer* risk to the insurer. The insurer does that by identifying a group that is homogenous enough that their premiums are just slightly over the payouts.

So an insurer can improve competitiveness by selling multiple products that cover different risk groups. I imagine that for Stripe, the risk variance falls in a fairy narrow band: bounded at the low end by not being worth insuring, and bounded at the high end by merchants losing their account.

* As opposed to say retaining risk, e.g. you don't buy collision on a beater.