This is great. I've never actually had a customer dispute a charge through Stripe, but if it happened, I wouldn't be able to challenge it before (I only charge $10 at a time, so it would have been cheaper to just accept it). This always concerned me because it left the possibility that a customer could go back and dispute the last year's worth of charges and there's nothing I could do. This happened once when I used Amazon FPS to process payments, and I was forced to just let the customer take $120 from me. I know it's not much money, but it's really discouraging when you do everything you can to be up-front about billing, (monthly payment notifications, no-question refunds, easy cancellations) and then you have to accept frivolous chargebacks which is basically admitting to the bank that you did something wrong.
Stripe's old approach was quite direct: the CC companies charge us (and don't refund) for refunded payments and chargebacks, so we pass those on to you.<p>Quite reasonable, but the new policy is taking advantage of the fact that they have the rare ability to fix this broken interface instead of just passing it on.<p>Refunded fees for refunds encourage easy refunds to dissatisfied customers. Offering refunds without crazy hoops to jump through is generally just good customer service (especially for service-related businesses where you don't have to worry about lost inventory!) -- it can quickly put a problem into a realistic context (and customers can realize "well, it's not perfect... but it's actually still worth keeping"), which makes them less frustrated.<p>I offer a refund <i>first</i> to a lot of tech support questions (i.e., "this isn't working on my computer"), and hardly anyone actually wants one, but it comforts them. Knowing that my fees would be lost make it less pleasant for me to offer... this is psychological pain (the actual cost is minimal), but I always appreciated PayPal's policy for this reason.
Are customer standards increasing to accommodate this? Will it attract the wrong kind of customers, resulting in a need to change standards in the future?<p>Besides those questions I see this policy as assuring new ecommerce application builders who aren't used to the risk of chargebacks and refunds. I really appreciate it.
THANK YOU! We moved from Paypal to Stripe this year for the lower rates and better interface but were bummed to find out that refund fees weren't returned as they are in Paypal and other payment services.<p>This change makes Stripe a total win.
The tough bit is still getting a chargeback in your favor as a merchant.<p>Refunded fees are nice, don't want to know how much money we have lost due to half fee refunds on PayPal.
The idea of a flat charge back fee is weird[1]. If I think about a store where I sell things for $1, it means if I exceed a 7% chargeback rate, my business is no longer profitable. Is that really all there is to it?<p>Edit: [1] Not weird as in weird on Stripe's part, but weird as from the perspective of someone who does not sell online, just seems like this one-size-fits-all approach probably makes a lot of low-margin selling really hard.
I'll have to rethink my Paypal vs. Stripe decision.<p>I'm actually setting up a store right now and I'm going with Paypal just because it's so much easier and cheaper.<p>With Paypal:<p>- After a sale I can buy and print out USPS labels and postage in 2 clicks and send the tracking and shipping info to my buyer in 1 click.<p>- I don't have to pay to integrate it into my site or buy a module ($27), the Paypal module is already included, and with Paypal I don't need SSL encryption (which can cost $50+ / year / domain).<p><i>1 way Stripe can remedy this is to make free Stripe Payment modules for major e-commerce stores.</i><p>I want to move to Stripe eventually because they don't try to get my users to sign up for a paypal account by hiding the credit card payment form beneath the paypal login and registration form. And I don't like Paypal's "side with the buyer even if they're a scammer" policy, not to mention the whole "your account funds have been frozen for 180 days while we investigate".<p>5 years from now I really hope Stripe branches out to cover a lot more than just credit card processing. Once they master that area I'd really love to see them become a small business e-commerce solutions provider. I'm sticking with Paypal until I get screwed over and have my funds frozen because in the short term, I'm saving so much more time and every dollar counts.<p>Hey Stripe, one day if you work on a store for small businesses I'd love to chat. The current options (WP E-commerce, shopify, magento, ebay, Amazon, etc...) are a pain in the ass (I've tried them all) and no one, ==> NO.ONE. <== , has made a proper packaging backend and USPS shipping calculator that doesn't screw either the buyer or the seller. Ebay comes close but even they fail terribly at package dimension calculation for multiple quantities ordered.
WePay has had free refunds since the start. I'm also still on their 3.5% flat rate which is better for my business which generally has <$50 items for sale.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Anyway - great news Stripe!
Stripe is awesome, I build a SaaS service where Stripe is the only payment gateway I support. When convincing my customers(who are all non-tech savvy) to use Stripe. The biggest push back they bring up is the 7 day wait period for transfers.<p>Does anyone know if there is a plan for this 7 day transfer wait period to be reduced just a bit?<p>This is the sole reason, why I am eventually planning to integrate with another option like Braintree even though Stripe has all my use cases well covered.
Sweet! That was one of my main gripes with the old policy: I should not be charged $15 for a chargeback ruled in my favor. Stripe has finally won me over fully. Keep up the great work.
You know what I would like to see? Better fees for Micro Payments. Amazon Payments has exactly the same fees for transactions >= $10 of 2.9% + $0.30 (and has always refunded fees for refunded payments), but adds a much more reasonable micro payment fee of 5% + $0.05 per transaction < $10.<p>Check out:<p><a href="https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/helpTab/Checkout-by-Amazon/Creating-Managing-Your-Account/Amazon-Payments-Fees" rel="nofollow">https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/helpTab/Checkout-by-Am...</a>
Thats great, but I'm a bit doubtful that the chargeback is going to be that great for any user. Granted the sample size on my side project is small, but I've never had a chargeback go my way even with logs of ip addresses, email exchanges, phone numbers, etc.<p>Absolutely love Stripe though, makes figuring out payment stuff a no brainer.
How often can you actually successfully challenge a chargeback for an online purchase? From what I've seen, the bank usually wants to see a copy of a receipt signed by the customer. As an online seller of a downloadable product, we never have anything physical signed by the customer.