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Comment by bertjk | Hacker News Reader

This is so strange. If Affirm is the creditor why does he not ask Affirm to initiate a chargeback against the merchant? Is this one way Affirm can compete against credit cards, that they do not need to handle this kind of situation?

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Affirm does allow people to open a chargeback dispute, but personally I was always taught to go through your credit card/bank.

Also, after reading this account I would be very hesitant to go through Affirm for anything. Chase seems responsive on the other hand.

>personally I was always taught to go through your credit card/bank.

For direct merchant/service provider purchases. Different beast than an installment loan, legally speaking. Regardless of Affirm botching things after the loan was paid, I suspect that the party reversing and withholding payment on the loan was taking a contractually and legally indefensible position.

The way I'm reading it is that Affirm doesn't know how to handle chargebacks gracefully. Maybe the chargeback system doesn't allow Affirm to "pass along" the chargeback to the merchant?

I would always suggest trying to initiate a chargeback through the actual payment handler first - if they're unresponsive then I think it's perfectly reasonable to turn to your bank.

This write up looks like a great argument to just try and work through the system first.

The issue here, is Affirm is the paying bank. OP effectively opened a credit account with Affirm, and used that credit account to buy something. Then did a chargeback of his payment to the credit account, instead of having the credit account do the chargeback.

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