It happened to me with 1and1.com. They renewed my domain name (for one I didn't care about) and my card had already expired. So instead of not renewing the domain, they renewed it and then billed me and sent it to collections. It hit my credit report but I mailed the collections agency a dispute asking them to prove it was a legitimate debt and they ended up dropping it. I don't do any business with 1and1.com anymore. This was back in 2012.
I run a small SaaS and people sign up, forget they signed up and then dispute the charge. I have always won those disputes. A failure to cancel isn’t the same thing as you were charged inaccurately. How am I supposed to know you intend to cancel without you actually cancelling? Should I just lock people out of their accounts each month until they proactively renew? Subscription pricing is just that: subscription pricing. If you want to buy a single newspaper, you pay a higher price than if you are a subscriber? You get a cheaper price because you are subscribing. So how do I know you actually “cancelled” if you didn’t? Am I obligated to provide you service and then you decide after the fact that you don’t want to pay? Newspapers don’t refund your past subscriptions just because you claim you didn’t read the paper. That’s not my problem. A subscription is a contract, an agreement, a deal. When you sign up for something, you are agreeing to the terms. If you don’t like them, don’t sign up. But disputing a valid payment is nothing more than theft. Forgetting you signed up isn’t an excuse. Of course it’s a different story if you did cancel and they keep billing — that is absolutely wrong. But just because you forgot isn’t a valid excuse. How are we (the service provider) supposed to know if you forgot? We are still providing you the service — whether you use it or not isn’t our concern just as newspapers aren’t obligated to ensure that you actually read the paper every day. Auto-renewing free trials however, that is a bit deceptive, so I agree with Mastercard’s approach.
I agre with the sentiment but disagree with the conclusion.
My approach to customer payment is that i don't want your money unless you're happy with the service so if you've gone as far as stopping payment with your card provider, I'll take that as a sign you don't want to be a customer anymore.
I never dispute chargebacks, but instead try to get the customer to withdraw it and behave like an adult, letting me refund and cancel his subscription like we would have had he simply asked.
There's no situation where I'd consider chasing down a customer who didn't want to pay to claw back my fourteen dollars. In my mind, it's not mine to have if he doesn't want me to have it.
> I never dispute chargebacks, but instead try to get the customer to withdraw it and behave like an adult, letting me refund and cancel his subscription like we would have had he simply asked.
I've tried to do this too, but unfortunately you're in the position of asking a former customer a favor, and you can't give them anything in return. They end up in the same position (getting refunded), but have to waste time on the phone with their bank. It's a tough sell, in my experience.
As the sibling comment already pointed out, getting the customer to reverse the dispute is a losing battle. They already got what they want.
And we're happy to refund, just drop us an email. But going around us to your bank leaves us not only with the refund, but also a chargeback fee, plus it hits our merchant reputation. Granted, it's a tiny fraction of all transactions (because we don't use dark patterns), but just feels really unfair, and not the adult thing in the first place.
I guess both our small business and the customers (and even banks, having to process disputes etc) pay the price for all those big-co contracts that are notoriously hard to cancel.
> But disputing a valid payment is nothing more than theft.
I'm always happy to steal from companies that turn my free trials into subscriptions. I'd steal more if I could.
You're coming at this as if the service provider is innocent, and merely providing a service. But we're talking explicitly about companies that give you free trials with the "asterisk, ps, you will pay real money in for this every month on this".
> But we're talking explicitly about companies that give you free trials with the "asterisk, ps, you will pay real money in for this every month on this".
No, this subthread is definitely about cancelling services in general.
As in you were skimming through the signup and didn't notice the part where you typed in your credit card details and clicked the subscribe button? That seems unlikely.
If you don't want to buy something, the best policy is not to buy it. Then you won't have bought it by accident and have to get your bank involved to unbuy it.
Then perhaps you've just been lucky. Sometimes merchants might decide it's not worth the trouble to go after you for a small amount, for example.
For comparison, I work on a service that uses recurring billing, and we have wording in our legal terms specifically so we can go after you for things like the cost of recovery as well if you abuse us like this. Our lawyer didn't include those words just for fun.
Abuse? I record all calls I make to customer service entities, with the opening, “Hi, I’m recording this call.” So yeah, in the four or five times I’ve had to do this, no one was dumb enough to take me to court, and if they did they’d lose. I make sure that I don’t use a service without paying for it, I make it clear what’s going happen and tell them to stop the service and that I’m going to stop payment. If they can’t manage that, by all means, talk to my attorney.
If you don’t consent to being recorded, they are required to serve you in an unrecorded line. And if they cannot, then you have been denied service. And if you’re denied service, you cannot cancel. So run the chargeback.
Um, no. That's not accurate at all. Maybe it's different outside the US, but many states are "single-party consent" states, meaning you don't need permission to record them and vice-versa. The biggest reason that many companies disclose the fact that they're recording the call is that you might be calling from a location that requires consent from all parties; they want to cover their butts.
I was mostly referring to here in California, but it would also apply to: Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.
In your earlier comment you said you cancel charges rather than dealing with "customer service".
It's only reasonable to interpret that as you not calling at all. And in that case it would be abuse to file a chargeback.
It seems like that's not what you actually meant, and you do call first? Great! But you shouldn't be confused that people misunderstood your earlier comment.
You're talking about a situation where you have demonstrably tried to cancel. The rest of us were talking about a situation where someone cancels payment but not the contract. Both legally and ethically speaking, those are entirely different scenarios.
Not very many. We don't use dark patterns and make it easy for people who want to cancel a subscription, so it's not a problem we have for the most part.
But on the relatively rare occasions that someone has been abusive -- the kind of person who repeatedly tries to sign up under different aliases and get a bit more for free in violation of terms, for example -- we can and sometimes do take action, and we have never lost.
It's a little disturbing that so many people's reaction here is apparently a form of wilful ignorance. You can downvote or make comments about how this has never happened to you or talk to your attorney or whatever if that makes you feel good, but your opinion does not change the legal situation: cancelling a payment method is not generally equivalent to cancelling a legally binding contract, and the advice to rely on doing so could lead to people being the wrong side of a real legal action, paying recovery costs that far exceed the original size of the debt, damaging their credit, etc.
