[robryan]

It is better if charge backs are seen as somewhat of an inconvenience to do, so customers will think more about if they really want to chargeback. Lots of things can and do go wrong in ecommerce, if anyone slightly annoyed reached for a chargeback rather than trying to resolve an issue with the merchant it would be a big hit for merchants.

[blantonl]

it is actually worse than that. There is certain type of online customer that will literally click through "Interested->Purchase->Yes->Confirm>Pay>Done" without every really looking at what they purchased or why they did so in the first place.

After they realize what they actually purchased which is a legitimate product but not appropriate for the customer, they just uses the chargeback process to get their money back.

[notatoad]

it is actually worse than that. There is a certain type of customer that will click through the whole process like you describe, and be perfectly satisfied with their purchase but not remember the name of the merchant. Then when it comes time to pay the credit card bill, it's an 'unrecognized charge' and they do a chargeback. They don't look through their email receipts and try to figure out what they've bought, they just initiate a chargeback blindly. fortunately it's fairly easy to fight these as a merchant, but it still takes valuable time.

[saurik]

Slightly less worse than that (sorry to break pattern), but another irritating example: it wasn't them that made the purchase, it was their son, husband, niece, whatever; I often get people sending me threatening e-mails about how I stole money from them, when in fact they share their credit card, PayPal account, etc. with other people and didn't have the courtesy to ask "anyone else know what this is?" before going all ballistic and demanding their money back.

[Firehed]

Recognition issues are comparatively easy to fight (unless it was an Amex payment, as they charge merchants more to get more screwed over) but you still get dinged with the chargeback fee and potentially a higher discount* rate because of the larger percentage of payments that have been charged back.

* Despite the name, you want the lowest discount rate you can get: it's the fee charged by your acquiring bank on top of interchange, and is basically the only thing in credit card payments that you have any ability to negotiate. As you'd expect, having more chargebacks hinders your ability to get the discount rate lowered.