>Refund rates that fall substantially above 5% are almost always tied to business quality - and those business SHOULD pay. Seriously, if you are refunding 20% of your business you need to look carefully at how you acquire business - stripe is not driving folks away from doing stuff online - you may be.

Do you know how often I have people buy something and then call me only to let me know they may have bought the wrong thing?

If you ISL6258AHRTZ & ISL6259AHRTZ, your refunds are likely not due to "business quality."

If you sell NXP610A3B and NXP1608, your refunds likely don't "business quality."

They reflect reality in a world where most people aren't savants with random long strings of seemingly meaningless letters/numbers that make up product codes for chipsets.

I used to employ a competitor in this field. We have taken different approaches to obtaining customers, and in setting up our respective online stores to be as simple as possible - to try and inform people what fits what even if they don't know what they are doing.

But lots of people don't read, then they buy things by mistake anyway.

>While refund rate of course is not definitively coupled to the quality of a business, we do see across our portfolio that it is strongly correlated. Given a basket of possible fees (for example, higher fees on Amex, which most other providers have), we prefer the fees that, on the margin, are least consequential for the businesses that are doing the best job of serving their customers.

What metrics are being used here to judge the quality of a business? How is whether a business is "quality" or not being judged by a credit card processing provider? What information is obtained to make judgments according to these metrics?

I've been in different online and in-person businesses. Some businesses have low refund rate with poor quality, others high refund rate with fine quality. I can say with certainty 100% of the refunds I gave when people sent back a product that was not the product I sent them(or even a product I sell) after they filed a chargeback had nothing to do with the quality of our business - the only thing the merchant would have access to is a he-said-she-said list of jpg files and ranting paragraphs. Hardly fitting information to judge the quality of a business on.

Honestly, I've looked as Stripe's offerings - I pay 2.15% right now with 40/60 online card not present/in-store card present and refunds are free. How is it with a 2.9% fee that people who rarely refund their customers have to pay the fee for those customers for the model to make sense? I'm not asking Stripe to match the fee of a large bank - but can we not charge an additional .7 percent and then say "it has to be done so we don't lose when people refund?"

This is outside the greater implications of this policy - if more merchant services take this on, we will be left with a world where only Amazon, eBay, and Walmart can offer "cancel" buttons on their site. Who will want to do business with small businesses if even something as basic as hitting the cancel button incurs fees?

If I buy a TV, or an ultrasonic cleaner, or a stereo, or some furniture from a small business vs amazon and I mess up something in my order, I have to pay a $45 fee - but when I buy it from amazon, I don't? Screw them, I'll use amazon.

If this is adopted by every single business, it will be just one of many factors that pushes customers in the direction of using Amazon over small businesses. It's hard enough competing with trillion dollar companies as is without erroneous fees being added in that were outside the overton window of business discussion 10 years ago.

To be clear, I have no problem with people choosing to make purchases from Amazon. I do have an issue with the industry slowly adding barriers to small businesses having the ability to compete on a level playing field. I'm all for them earning a good reputation, but we shouldn't be working to put sour tastes in the mouths of every customer who f'd up and made an order in error with someone that they will not have with a larger company.