Comment by barkingcat
5 days ago
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.
there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.
ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
Unless you're big cheese, too many disputes can get a company cut off. Disputes aren't free to mediate, there's a cost to handle each one.
Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.
The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole customer service the better, because it is difficult for companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer service in the first place.
There's a misunderstanding here. I'll make it clearer.
The "Unless you're big cheese" is the company you're doing the charge back against.
If a company, such as Anthropic has too many chargebacks? Visa/MC can ban them from their network. It happens to smaller companies all the time, mostly because it costs Visa/MC + the banks involved to deal with each chargeback, and also, it's typically a sign of fraudulent behaviour.
Visa/MC are not a charity, or are payment processors. They need profit. Take it away by creating all this extra work, chargeback work, and they're not making money any more.
The "big cheese" part is, if you're amazon or google, things can be negotiated at that scale. Maybe they pay a larger settlement fee, whatever. And of course Google Play, or Amazon utterly dwarfs Anthropic CC activity at this point, even though they have a large valuation and potential future ahead.
Still, I have no idea what the background metrics and profit points are for Visa/MC, only that I've seen even medium sized companies have issues with too many chargebacks. And, we've all seen Visa/MC decide they don't like gambling, or porn sites and just drop them. Some of those companies were quite large and had a lot of flow for them.
So I don't think many companies will just use chargebacks as a support mechanism. That is, unless they're just completely incompetent.
2 replies →