I bring this up because there’s all sort of online and offline services and clubs people subscribe to. Whether it be a gym that bans you from the premises because they claim you violated some house rule, an online service that issues a ban because they claim you shared the password with someone else, or an online game that bans because they claim you were cheating, in all these cases, the consumer has paid for a service and they are not receiving it. Or a movie theater that throws a customer out for talking on the phone.
And maybe they did the thing alleged and maybe they did not.
What I am curious about is whether or not from a practical sense if the merchant can even win this. Credit card companies have “chargeback codes” - reasons to honor a chargeback request and give the customer their money back if specific events happen. One of them being if the merchant denies service.
Will the credit card company even hear in some sort of arbitration the merchant’s claimed reason? I bring this up because the crowd loves to tell stories about that person thrown out of an establishment for cause, that cheater banned from a game, etc. About how justice is done. And when someone points out that they could get their money back and go elsewhere (or the same service in the online case, assuming they change to a new username/email and maybe swap IPs), they say the offender deserved what they got and won’t get their money back.
Is this true? I’ve only ever issued a chargeback a handful of times. Never lost a single dispute - it never even came do a dispute, every chargeback I have ever issued the bank gave me my money back and that was that.
All the businesses you mentioned…take a look at their TOS. It’s likely spelled out. In most cases, it’s stated that if you violate their rules, you’ll be banned and there will be no refund. In those cases, you, the customer, won’t win the chargeback*. You can try, but the company will show the processor their TOS and what you violated and the processor will likely rule in their favor.
That’s different and probably the reason chargebacks are handled on a case by case basis. When there’s a chargeback, the money is taken from the merchants bank account and held by the processor. The merchant then has to explain their side, there’s some back and forth and eventually the processor makes a decision and gives that person the money.
You can find all this online by looking up “[MasterCard/Amex/Visa] merchant agreement”, it gets ridiculously specific.
Of course they’ll hear the merchant’s side of things (and ‘the crowd’ won’t have anything to do with anything). They don’t just blindly hand the money back based on what a customer says.
Just to clarify, were you a customer requesting a chargeback or a merchant?
And regarding coming back to the same place, I was just saying to someone today that I wish their was a way to ‘block’ a credit card number (or name) from using their card at our business. A while back a customer did (well, attempted) a chargeback. We ‘won’, but it still cost us a small fee and a lot of time. He’s one of those people that ALWAYS found a problem with everything we did…everytime he was in the store, we’d get a call about something being wrong. Nothing was every wrong and I’d be willing to bet he did this everywhere he went. In any case, there’s nothing stopping him from shopping at our store again, using his CC and then doing another chargeback. From his POV, he won’t lose any money and he might get a full refund. I’d prefer if he didn’t shop at our store, at least not with a credit card.
*Of course, the processor charges a fee to the merchant for ALL chargebacks, even if they’re 100% without merit, so I suppose the customer can consider that a win, even if they didn’t get their money back.
Joey, can you cite a specific example? Anyone can put anything they want into the ‘TOS’ for something, it’s hardly an ironclad contract. Often un enforceable in court generally.
And I won all my disputes as a consumer. Merchant never even replied.
I’ve wondered that about this very board - if the mods ban a paying member, and they initiate a chargeback, is some poor bank employee stuck reading the original posts, the warnings, the ATMB threads protesting the warnings, etc, etc.
Off the top of my head, a customer attempting to return something outside of the posted return period won’t have an easy time winning a dispute.
But if we’re talking about something that involves a subscription or membership (say, web hosting or a gym) and you agree to a set of rules and you agree that if you break any of these rules, your membership/sub will be cancelled and no refund will be issued…and again, you agreed to all this, then you don’t have a whole lot of wiggle room to win a chargeback if you violate it.
Most things that you have to sign up for will have some sort of clause along the lines of this one, for Amazon Prime, “we will not give any refund for termination related to conduct that we determine, in our discretion, violates these Terms”.
Keep in mind, a chargeback is supposed to be used because the merchant broke their end of the agreement, not because you did. If you try to skirt around the rules, sure, you might win, but the processor also has a department dedicated to this, a several hundred page guide (that you can find online and read) and probably see this every day.
Also, if the merchant doesn’t reply, it’s automatic win for the customer. You could go and do a charge back on a can of soup you bought at the grocery store and give some reason that doesn’t even apply, but if they don’t reply, you’ll get your money back.
No…well, kinda. Someone hear would get the notification. If they chose to fight it, they would link to the relevant part of the board rules/TOS as well as link to the relevant posts and explain or quote what the user did.
I doubt anyone from the credit card company would have to read more than a few paragraphs.
They don’t do the research, they just make a ruling based on the evidence each party supplies.
IANAL, but I thought you could “fire a customer” in the sense of saying “we don’t want your business” as long as it wasn’t because the customer was a member of a protected class, like black people or gay people or things like that.
Back in the day, probably forty years ago by now so take it FWIW I worked in credit, and occasionally had to be the one to tell some obnoxious deadbeat that we weren’t going to sell to her (for some reason it was mostly women). I found things went better when I didn’t bother with explanations. Just “Sorry, ma’am, we have decided we won’t sell to you.” Then just ignore whatever she said and keep repeating “No”, or “No thank you ma’am” until she goes away.
Agreed, and in the 40 years this store has been here, we’ve told a handful of people that they’re no longer welcome to shop here anymore.
However, it’s a store and I can’t have eyes everywhere. So, for example, in this case the customer bought about $200 worth of stuff, called up because a problem with one 50¢ item. We bent over backwards to make it right and he eventually inititated a chargeback on the entire $200 order (it’s an all or nothing thing, you can’t request a partial chargeback as far as I know).
However, if this person comes into the store, picks shops and checks out, I’m not likely to even know they’re in the building. But…if I could block their credit card from working, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about them trying to get $200 worth of merchandise for free.
Even if/when I win chargebacks, it’s still a headache to deal with and we get charged a fee, regardless of the outcome.
But, as credit card companies continually work to make using your credit card easier and faster, they’re not likely to implement something like this.
I once paid for someone’s membership, and they got banned a couple of days later. I mentioned this in a post, and a mod offered to refund my money, but I declined.
I asked a friend who works for a major credit card company. For a small amount like an SDMB subscription, the CC company would just write it off. There’s a certain figure, around $25-$30, where it is pointless to pay an employee to research a dispute.
The SDMB subscription isn’t a recurring charge either. They do have a different policy for gym memberships or other recurring charges, especially when it could get ugly and everyone knows the merchant makes it very hard to cancel.
That’s fine. But let’s suppose the customer has already paid you for something. Maybe it’s a coffee per day membership or something.
And they broke the clause hidden in your tos about “don’t be a dick”. And arguably they were a dick but the matter is debatable.
You are well within your rights to throw the customer out but not within your rights to keep their money they already paid. Even if it was clear they broke your rules. So the credit card company will probably give them the money back if they ask. (Maybe pro rate - if it was day 5 of the coffee membership out of 30, they get 5/6 refund)
As for research and arbitration at the credit card company - dunno. This seems like a tricky subject. Simpler to just always return the money and let the merchant take the customer to court if they have a dispute still.
That has nothing to do with what you wrote. Do you think that a business is legally entitled to keep someone’s money if they pre-paid but broke the terms of their contract? Because that’s what it looks like you wrote.
The OP acts like he took these businesses to court and won. When in reality he disputed the charge on his credit card. The bank refunded his money, simply because the business didn’t put up a fight. That doesn’t mean you won a legal battle and you have a legal right to your refund. It means that the business decided to not to fight you on your $30 refund request.
Hardly. I am simply skeptical a credit card company is going to put itself in the middle and act like a court when it can simply apply policies simply and blindly. Hence my skepticism that “terms and conditions” will even get looked at other than to say that if a customer is not receiving the service they paid for, they get their money back, no matter who’s “fault” it was they stopped receiving it.
I can’t find anything online to be honest. All the “here’s how to get chargeback money back from customers” guides basically say in a scenario like this a merchant has to refund the money.
A chargeback in my experience is a “guilty until proven innocent” strike at the merchant from the customer’s bank and the merchant’s merchant account (a merchant account is what allows them to charge credit/debit cards.) When a merchant receives a chargeback notice, the merchant account removes the disputed amount from the merchant’s bank account and sends a letter to the merchant. It is then up to the merchant to respond within X days (60 or something like that) with a brief summary of their side of the story and any proof/documentation that the charge was valid. If the bank rules in favor of the merchant, the merchant gets their money back. What exactly happens to make the bank rule in favor of the merchant I don’t know but it’s probably much less exhaustive and glamorous than either party would imagine.
I’ve had at least one occasion where a customer issued a chargeback on a charge they didn’t recognize, but then realized it was a valid charge. It look quite a bit of back-and-forth with their small-town bank to get that straight. The customer agreed the charge was valid, my bank agreed the charge was valid, but getting the customer’s bank (that initiated the chargeback) to agree was like pulling teeth. It wasn’t that they were unwilling, they were just unreachable and slow.
A note on online gaming accounts. If you do a chargeback on a service like Steam or Origin that sells downloadable games, I’ve heard stories they will ban your entire account and therefore access to all the games you’ve purchased.
One more comment on chargebacks; they are rather traumatic for small businesses. When a chargeback yanks the money from their account, the business has to go digging up paperwork from a long-ago completed purchase to justify the charge. In my experience a chargeback is usually a purchase that someone made but forgot about. I’ve always worked hard to resolve chargebacks and I believe I have never lost one, but it takes time and effort often well beyond what the original product or service was worth. Stripe.com has told me that at least with their service all chargebacks count against the merchant no matter what the outcome, have too many chargebacks and they will start talking to you about how to do things differently.
And some businesses exacerbate this problem by not putting their public-facing name on people’s credit card statements. I know someone who ended up accidentally getting some free snacks when one of his cards was compromised. The bank person rattled off a bunch of business names, and he said he’d never heard of any of them. But one of them was the local gas station, which was using its franchisee’s company name rather than the name of the brand.
I need a cite on that. Is there any law making it illegal for a company to write up, and have you sign, and enforce, an agreement that says “if you violate these rules, your membership will be revoked and you will not receive a refund for the remainder of the term”, or something along those lines.
Sure they do. As I mentioned earlier they have guides and rules that you can find on the internet and an entire chargeback department. In fact, my processor just set up a new chargeback portal. Getting in the middle of this is exactly what they do.
I said all this. As a merchant I’ve been through this. I’m not sure why you think it’s made up.
Earlier, I mentioned that you could google “[card name] merchant agreement” to find these online. That’s, literally, all I did, and pulled up all of these links as the first hit for each search.