Dealing with refund requests is easy. The problem is customers who request chargebacks from their banks instead of requesting refunds from you.
Payment providers usually contest such chargebacks automatically. This ends up costing you a fee. And if you lose the dispute, or issue a refund as a matter of course, these chargebacks contribute to lowering your account's reputation. If this gets out of hands it can put your ability to receive payments in jeopardy.
What would be much more ideal is that, when the bank signals that one of its customers is contesting a charge, the payment provider would simply refund the charge without questions. And, assuming refunds (and chargebacks) are the exception rather than the rule, without the process lowering your score.
Ideal for a company that has near infinite markup on the goods (eg. SaaS business with very good unit economics). As somebody that processes a lot of payments for physical goods (electronic devices) the preference is not as clear cut. You ship out the goods in the COGS value of couple K of USD just to get the chargeback.
We've ended up adding additional heuristics to mark the fishy payments and manual checking before shipping out.
Something like Stripe Chargeback protection actually makes sense and I'll ask my team to look into the ratio of chargebacks to see if it makes sense to migrate from Braintree just because of this.
Dealing with refund requests is easy. The problem is customers who request chargebacks from their banks instead of requesting refunds from you.
Payment providers usually contest such chargebacks automatically. This ends up costing you a fee. And if you lose the dispute, or issue a refund as a matter of course, these chargebacks contribute to lowering your account's reputation. If this gets out of hands it can put your ability to receive payments in jeopardy.
What would be much more ideal is that, when the bank signals that one of its customers is contesting a charge, the payment provider would simply refund the charge without questions. And, assuming refunds (and chargebacks) are the exception rather than the rule, without the process lowering your score.