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7 Comments

Cry for help: Stripe subscription disputes

Hi gals and pals,
tl;dr customer is daisy-chaining disputes of being charged after claiming that subscription has been cancelled (I received no such request), which negatively affects my standing with Stripe. So my questions to you are:

  1. How do you mitigate such risk?
  2. Have you ever won such dispute? If so what evidence have you presented?
  3. [Stretch goal ] Keen to share your onbaord/offboard design, which makes proving to the bank that the customer had not requested cancellation bulletproof.

I have the following predicament (to say it lightly):
I am running a one-man show SaaS with monthly subscription plan. Now, in order for customers to cancel the subscription , they need to reach me via the in-app chat or just send me an email, which works reasonably well.
There is however sub 1%, which prefers to open up a dispute with the bank and claim, that they have been charged after cancelling the subscription (which they did not), for collecting a cool month worth of payment back. I usually just swallow it up.
However, I have now met a new breed, which opened up this kind of dispute. As per usual, I have contacted it over it (always do, but nobody actually cared to reply) asking to revoke the dispute if I would in exchange refund it a month worth of sub, to which it agreed. So I promptly fulfilled my end of the agreement and recorded the refund taking place on video, packaged it all up and sent it to it asking to fulfill it's end of the bargain. Then 4 days passed, with that opened dispute still pending and finally today ... I have received another dispute from it, but now over a different month! Given that it stayed over 6 months with me (so potentially can open up disputes on all of them), it now has an ability to single handedly pluck me over and needless to say I am at total loss how to deal with it. I did sent an email to Stripe explaining what's going on, but I feel like it gonna fall on deaf ears.
Emotions aside, how to prevent it going forward?
Do you have a protocol for customer onboarding/offboarding, which would reasonably satisfy banks, that request/action for cancellation was not performed by the client?
I have read that banks want to see that you do not let customers pay until they read through terms and conditions (ToS), which explain how to cancel the subscription. I am willing to go a full mile to completely redesign my processes (if I would not be banned by Stripe), by introducing the subscription management panel, the pop-ups with ToS, etc...
But then again, what is stopping the customer to claim he or she did click the cancellation button, but were still charged afterwards? How do you deal with it?

on March 6, 2020
  1. 1

    These subscription disputes where the customer claims they cancelled when they never did are one of the most frustrating things to deal with, so sharing what actually wins them in case it helps anyone here.
    The key thing most people miss: the bank is not asking "did the customer cancel?" It is asking "can the merchant prove the customer agreed to be billed on that date and never withdrew that agreement?" Those are different questions, and the evidence has to answer the second one.
    What wins a subscription cancelled dispute is a specific package, in this order: the signup record showing the customer accepted recurring billing with a timestamp, proof that there is no cancellation request anywhere in your system, and usage or login logs showing the customer kept using the product after the disputed charge. Together that tells one story the bank cannot easily argue with: an active, paying user who agreed to the billing and never asked to stop. "I have no cancellation record" on its own is just one sentence and usually loses.
    For the daisy-chaining case where the same person opens dispute after dispute, the strongest move is to stop defending each charge in isolation and start documenting the pattern. Their full payment history, continued usage across multiple billing periods, and the timeline of their disputes all become evidence that this is one person repeatedly clawing back charges for a service they actively used.
    Hope that helps whoever runs into this next.

  2. 1

    Hello!

    I've got some experience in Risk Management for e-commerce and fintech for a couple of years in the past as a consultant in Latin and North America, not dedicated to this anymore but I could definitely help with some advices/visibility about this world under my experience. I am open to talk about it, just send me an email.

    Thanks,

  3. 1

    My recommendation would be to get a new payment processor that provides better customer service. The comment of "falling on deaf ears" is unacceptable to your business when choosing a payments vendor.

  4. 1

    I have a rock solid solution to your problem. We can provide you with your very own branded payment gateway. All for less than you are paying Stripe
    Spudedu@gmail.com

  5. 1

    Have a look at https://www.chargehound.com

    It's a service that automates dealing with chargebacks, see screenshots here:
    https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1234662201106919428

  6. 1

    Stripe recently launched “chargeback protection” which is worth looking into.

    With this specific customer, I’d refund all their payments proactively so they can’t file any more disputes.

    1. 1

      Hi @dv8, definitely look into Stripe's Chargeback protection: https://stripe.com/fr/radar/chargeback-protection

      We have had a few disputes over time with @Mailmeteor. The first one was someone who purchased 4 monthly plans. It costs us almost $100 dollars in total, because Stripe charges €15 euros per dispute in France and the transaction have to be refunded to the customer.

      Now that we have this protection, we don't have to pay a single penny in case of a dispute AND we keep the money. The cost is 0,4% per transaction. No brainer in our case.

      PS: the advice provided above by @unstoppable make sense. In total, you will have a limited number of disputes if you do implement great customer care. Although, I'd say it's unavoidable to have some disputes when you begin to process a lot of payments.

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago