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shkkmo 2 days ago

Perhaps this is a question you should be asking yourself. Is your cancellation system working? There was a billing session created the day after the initial charge, are you sure there wasn't an attempt to cancel the that the system failed to register and log due to an error? If I try to cancel and it doesn't work, I'm not gonna waste time trying to figure out how to work around it or filing a bug report. I'm gonna go straight to the charge back.

Is your cancellation mechanism consumer friendly? You don't do proration when people cancel and say you only "meet them halfway" when they go through the effort of requesting a refund in response to this user hostile policy.

There are a lot of very user unfriendly policies and implementations. Sometimes companies that legitimately try to do the right thing get caught in the blowback, but more commonly, companies aren't as user friendly as they like to pretend and have adopted at least some of the pervasive dark patterns.

greyb a day ago | parent [-]

>Perhaps this is a question you should be asking yourself. Is your cancellation system working? There was a billing session created the day after the initial charge, are you sure there wasn't an attempt to cancel the that the system failed to register and log due to an error?

This happened to me once with a meal planning app (Eat This Much). I did validly cancel and get a cancellation email, but Stripe had errored out (I didn't realize this) and I ended up disputing the charge with my credit card because I couldn't get a hold of them (they had just done some UI changes that unfortunately broke their in-app contact function).

In the exit survey, I mentioned I was disappointed that they chose not to honor my cancellation request. Their support person reached out to me to let me know that they couldn't refund me without me dropping my dispute, but my dispute was already marked as resolved by my bank. I guess they issued a courtesy credit and didn't want to deal with the back-and-forth internally.

I sent them the cancellation email that I had received proving my cancellation. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't received that email, they would've cursed me up and down as one of these "anti-social chargebackers", because it confused them enough that their CEO personally emailed me to apologize; they found the Stripe error in their logs, it had only happened one other time in recent history, and they wouldn't appeal my dispute as a result. They did offer me a free month, but I really did want to cancel - it just wasn't working for me, but at least they were nice about it.

I'm sure without that added context, the story would've been the same as this post - yet another person charging back and not reaching out first to explain. I was pretty angry about the situation at first (having no knowledge it errored out or that they would be more willing to refund me than deal with my chargeback), but they were a small team, they were nice about it, and I dropped my interest in posting a public complaint about it.

papa_bear a day ago | parent [-]

I remember this! Sorry again for the frustration >_< We made our Stripe API requests a little more robust after this happened.

We do get a fair number of disputes like the author where customers will cancel after getting billed, and then dispute it, even though we always give refunds to people who email and ask for one. It also feels like there's been a significant up-tick in recent months of disputes like these, maybe a reflection of the current economic climate. Hard to blame the customer though, for all the reasons listed by the top comment -- sometimes it's just easier to do it through the bank than figure out how to cancel through an app you forgot you even subscribed to.

greyb a day ago | parent [-]

Haha, I'm amused you remember. I went back in my emails and it happened back in 2018. I was a not-so-eloquent college student back then. I appreciated that you both handled it with grace and kindness - sorry if I sounded irate at the time, and hope you're doing well these days. :)