| I'm a very very happy Stripe customer for some time now. We're operating a marketplace and Stripe made it really easy for us to charge our customers' credit cards. Until then we had to rely on PayPal and that was quite a pain in the ass. The only thing that was really positive with using PayPal as our CC processor is that they always reimbursed you the fees in case you wanted to refund the payment. We have a 14 day money back guarantee - what it means is that you can request your money back if you have a valid reason and we'll refund you. Since we want to really delight our customers (much like Amazon does) we always accept refund requests and that means we had to cover the costs of the fees paid to stripe. Granted this isn't much compared to our overall gross revenues but I can see how in certain cases for certain individual (selling high value products) that could mean losses. What I'd like to see tho and I haven't seen it yet - is the ability to get the chargeback refunded in case I decide not to fight it. I know this usually involve some work on both sides, however I think this should be automated and the chargeback lifted if I decide to make Stripe's life easier. I also understand this could be potentially abused by potentially allowing every "fraud" attempts to pass and not fighting back the chargeback would mean you don't have some skin in the game and not motivated to stop these fraud attempts. Which is why I think these chargebacks should be refunded only if they don't exceed a certain threshold. The biggest problem is for marketplace who are selling intangible goods, whenever we get hit with a chargeback - it doesn't really matter and I usually don't fight it even if I know the customer really paid for it since I know they're doomed to fail. So winning a chargeback is out of question anyway, however I'd love to get my chargebacks covered by Stripe in the event the chargeback was made by either a legit customer (and for some reason didn't ask for a refund) or slipped through my fraud prevention tools but I decide not to fight it back. If a publisher would see too many of these chargebacks (and thus showing he's making no effort to prevent fraudulent charges), I think the chargeback protection should be cancelled and maybe Stripe should charge for these chargebacks retrospectively. Anyway - great news Stripe! |
This is unlikely to happen. The chargeback fee is levied on the acquiring bank (merchant processor) by the card associations which is then passed onto the merchant.
Best way to avoid chargeback fines is to have better fraud prevention process in place. Companies like Stripe are really just passing on costs that are imposed on them. Stripe offering to refund the fee if you win the case is a great gesture but only solves part of the issue with chargebacks in particular friendly fraud chargebacks.