| I'm of two minds on this; I think maybe Jason could have understood how chargebacks work a little better - but at the same time, I think Square could probably streamline this process. Most of all, this bit of one of the emails from Square kind of set off alarms in my head as bad practice: "It is our pleasure to inform you that this inquiry has been preliminarily closed in your favor. While this is promising, it is also conditional. Your funds are eligible for automated release on or around 30 April 2012 once additional confirmation is secured." I don't think "preliminary closure" of a chargeback even makes sense, does it? Either it's closed or it's not closed. I understand that they might have various steps in the inquiry, but letting the customer know ahead of time that everything is probably going to work out well for them, apparently in order to soothe them, is setting the situation up very badly in cases where the preliminary positive resolution doesn't actually get confirmation later on. What's more, it's clear that this didn't even set the correct expectation in the event of a positive finding. They named a date, and then promptly failed to meet it. If I were designing a system to do this, it seems like it would be best just to let the customer know you're inquiring, that it may be a few weeks, and that they must keep a certain amount of money in their account until the inquiry is over. (Obviously I haven't designed such a system, and I know it's difficult. This approach just seems inevitably problematic to me, though.) |