Stripe Chargeback Protection

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?

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.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's possible.

On Stripe, attempting to refund an actually disputed charge results in an error / invalid request.

https://stripe.com/docs/error-codes#charge-disputed

It does work for inquiries but I am not sure how often those happen vs. "proper" declines/chargebacks. I'd assume the majority is of the latter type.