Show HN: I wrote a 2000 word article on dealing with chargebacks
operational.coThis is great writing, thanks for sharing.
The only thing I was left wondering though is what kind of success rate one should expect on Stripe appeals. I know back in the 2000s it was well-known that PayPal appeals/arbitration were a bit of a kangaroo court, and that outcomes varied wildly depending on the arbitrator or day of the week.
If I'm diligent in gathering evidence and can reasonably show that the customer did indeed in good faith sign up for my service and that it was delivered as advertised, can I expect Stripe to side with me?
I expect the answer is some variation of "it depends" but I'd love to hear your thoughts either way :)
Technically speaking, Stripe has nothing to do with this(since they are the middle man). I'll telling you this because I recently won 2 chargebacks against amex bank.
In the appeal process, Stripe will give you a rating of how likely you are to win this dispute.
Ignore this rating.
When disputing, you need to provide solid evidence of:
- Whether said customer read tos
- Login logs with ip addresses
- Terms and service
- Communications(emails, chat logs, etc)
- A simple brief on your business and why this chargeback was in error(I do this)
This will 90% of the time make you win the chargeback.
However in the longer run, I've found you're better off focusing on avoiding suspect users. Here's another article on how you can avoid them:
https://operational.co/articles/how-to-get-high-quality-user...
I'm no expert on this aspect but I've a hypothesis: providing free tier can also reduce (friendly) chargebacks.
Chargebacks by scummy customers can easily destroy a business as some providers charge up to 20$ fee alone for the chargeback in addition to the original charge. Is there a payment method that doesn't accept chargebacks on the customer side (final transaction) but is still fast like a Credit Card?
I don't think so (except maybe crypto). Customers (obviously) prefer payment methods with customer protection as there is also the case where businesses scam customers.
Unfortunately, apart from crypto, there's no other true 1-way payment.