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341 points shedside | 4 comments | | HN request time: 1.048s | source
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jasonkester ◴[] No.20082119[source]
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?

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1. ysavir ◴[] No.20082227[source]
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.

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2. ddebernardy ◴[] No.20082570[source]
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.

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3. luka-birsa ◴[] No.20083320[source]
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.

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4. ddebernardy ◴[] No.20084985{3}[source]
No quibble there. Stripe Chargeback makes good sense indeed in your scenario.