Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case. Your CC company should make it very easy to login and mark the charge as problematic. They want to know if bad charges are coming in from the vendor, and this is the best way to track it.
I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.
Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges.
I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening.
I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
There was a somewhat recent case of someone having their amazon account with all their media they purchased licenses to view via their Amazon account taken away from them permanently for issuing a charge back due to some disputed activity on their account. So, before you go around issuing charge backs, you should think of the consequences of disputing your account status with that merchant. You may end up losing access to ALL your Steam games just because some kid cracked your password and purchased a $1 game with your account. This is the danger of having an account on these digital distribution sites everyone seems to be so fond of. Sure, you can download your movies without having to leave your house to go to Blockbuster, but what do you do when you get your entire account locked on the Microsoft Zune Marketplace because of one charge? You could lose your entire iTunes library because you failed to recognize one charge that your kid made without your permission. Any such event could (and very well may) actually cut you off from your entire media library while you resolve your situation, if you actually manage to solve it. What if someone cracks your Battle.NET account and uses your copy of World of WarCraft to run a gold farming bot or a cheating script, and now you lose access to your entire Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House funds. You could literally have thousands of dollars taken away from you without it being your fault in the slightest. You know, provided you have a time machine and go back to 2013 when the D3 RMAH was actually a thing. In any case, this is a real danger where you can lose a lot of value over a simple charge back, and there is little to protect you from this retaliatory account locking that distributors of digital goods are so fond of lording over us plebs. Again, this is a serious issue. Do consider it whenever you think about issuing a charge back on your accounts. Now, the more faithful a customer to a digital distributor you are, the more you get screwed over by complaining about them mistakenly charging you for things you didn't purchase, or other such situations where you are forced to issue a charge back because you couldn't get the vendor to resolve an issue with the money they charge you for transferring some data to your system. I won't even touch the discussion on how physical media cost the same as the digital access despite the obvious lack of printing the medium, producing it, shipping it, warehousing it, displaying it in a store, securing it in the store, advertising it in the store, and selling it via a cashier. Running the download and billing servers has to be several orders of magnitude less expensive, not to mention that some distributors (Blizzard) use peer to peer downloads to make you distribute the software for them in addition to downloading it. And somehow they are the same price. Go figure.
My original comment actually included a bit about how common knowledge is that Valve can and does lock you out of your Steam account if you issue a chargeback, but I decided not to include it because it's really just hearsay (I don't know anyone personally who has experienced this).
Seconded. On the rare occasion that I will dispute a charge, I am one hundred percent sure I did not initiate it before contacting my card issuer. If I think there was an error rather than fraud, I'll always try to work it out with the merchant first rather than risk my welcome to do business with them in the future.
FWIW, in principle I agree with both points being made, but in practice I just didn't want to be responsible for following the issue and making sure it got resolved correctly. I wanted to hear "oops, leave it to us" and then stop thinking about it.
Perhaps worth adding, I was/am 99% sure how the charge occurred, and that it was a Heisenbug from when I'd trialled Prime. So there was no question of punishing them for being a bad vendor, I just needed them to bounce the issue around until it landed on someone who could fix it (which is essentially what happened).
I think the real root cause of situations like this is that social teams sometimes have more/better options for escalating issues than customer support does.
That was not the case here though. Amazon probably said to dispute it because that is the way to get it to the right people. The advantage of that from your prospective is the CC company takes over with dealing with Amazon for you and it's off your shoulders.
You are misguided in this. For the vendor/service provider/whatever, it's a $15 charge per chargeback regardless of the outcome. So If I sell you a monthly service for $6 per month and you forget to cancel it after three months, then at end of year check your statement and notice the charges and decide to make chargebacks to correct it...Then you just cost me 96 + 915, $189, which means I am in the hole $171 because you suck at managing your checkbook.
This is bordering on ranting, but happens all the time and is just a cost of doing business, which means my regular customers get to pay more to deal with people like you. Contact the merchant first, they are usually very prompt and want to avoid chargebacks like the plague, because they cost real money.
I completely agree that subscription charges for a service you signed up for and could have, but didn't bother to cancel is not a valid chargeback. If you initiate one and complete the interview questions honestly I think the chargeback would actually not be allowed. (Do you recognize the merchant? Yes. Did you approve the charge? Yes. Did the merchant deliver the product or service? Yes. Hmmm... Sorry, we can't refund your money)
However there is a slippery slope. Two examples that hit me recently, an iDrive renewal where they refused to tell me the renewal price and their online form provided no way to opt-out of the renewal, their online chat told me to call a phone number, and it turns out the price was 10x the first year cost (and not at all competitive with any other backup service). Another was BitTorrent Sync which was supposed to be converted to a one-time license but then lo-and-behold a year later another charge showed up.
But for merchants that provide the ability to cancel a subscription online, and who let users know before an annual charge is about to hit your card, I agree the customer has some responsibility to manage their subscription.
My personal opinion is that monthly recurring billing can send invoices after the charge or even no email at all if charges are the same amount every month. Annual recurring should email a week before the charge to remind a customer it's coming, or should allow a full refund of the charge if contacted within 30 days of it hitting. For example LinkedIn refunded an annual recurring charge that I contacted them about within a few days of it hitting the card for a "subscription" I didn't actually want and it just took a single email to sort out.
In any case, if I signed up online I must be able to cancel online with a click. I won't play games with merchants who have dark patterns that make me jump through hoops or pick up a phone to manage an online subscription. These merchants deserve the extra chargebacks they get, and they know exactly how they could reduce their chargeback rates. They've just done the math and found the dark patterns unfortunately are net-profitable.
I'm sure you're right about the probability that many small business owners would still behave honorably if problems were brought to their attention first, but GP was, verbatim, referring to "bad charges coming in from the vendor," and "fraudulent or even mistaken charges," which is quite different than the negligent-customers scenario you're describing.
Edit: Not to mention that GP is referring to an anecdote of GGP's in which Amazon told him to dispute the charge because they couldn't sort it out. That's disgraceful.
Yeah, you could say I used the comment as a soap box to rant about something that I experience all the time :) In some cases chargebacks work great and should be used. I've honestly never had to use one, since merely mentioning it to any merchant or service has been enough to get my problem resolved promptly. Sorry for the derailment :)
I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.