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Comment by charlesabarnes | Hacker News Reader

I find it extremely strange that a company would encourage a credit card dispute. Wouldn't that affect the standing of eBay with credit card processors?

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Not if the company knows they will win the dispute. It's an easy way to get rid of the complainer and send them to annoy someone else.

That's not how it works. Even the act of having a customer dispute you hurts you are a merchant, so it's better for the merchant to avoid them entirely.

A lot of payment processors will charge regardless of outcome.

Stripe's docs, for instance, mention this:

> Once a cardholder initiates a dispute, it is no longer possible to avoid the fee.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/dispute-fees-faq

Additionally, according to Stripe at least, these disputes will remain on your "record" with the particular network:

> All disputes, whether they’re won or lost, count towards your dispute rate, so the best strategy to avoid monitoring programs is dispute prevention.

https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/measuring

Even if the customer withdraws the request, it still counts and you still have to pay the fee.

I'm sure eBay has better terms with looser thresholds, but even they are not impervious to the dispute system. At some point the networks can say "nah, we'd rather not deal with you" and there isn't much eBay could do about it.

Yes, if people raise a lot of disputes it causes your processing fees to go up.

Kayla did say eBay would "accept" the dispute though, so maybe there's some sort of process that makes it a refund?

Typically when you make a dispute the CC company reaches out to the vendor. The vendor can then make their case. Sounds like eBay was saying they wouldn't: they would just accept the loss. I believe they'd still be dinged though, as the first step of filing a dispute is "Yes, I have tried reaching out to the vendor first."

Still, how likely is it that someone in customer support (Kyla) would have any involvement in those in fraud/finance (who presumably would respond to the dispute)?

It sounds like an "unofficial" attempt to help, which can be disastrous. Kyla may KNOW that almost all credit card disputes go through because Ebay just eats them as the cost of business, but it may ALSO be the case that it could trigger something that makes them ban everything.

Think of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8GtrKtrZ4

> Sounds like eBay was saying they wouldn't

They will. I was defrauded for a few hundred bucks by credit card thieves acting as me on ebay. eBay has a legal department that will fight you to the end of the earth when you file a dispute against ebay. I would contest something and they would send 40+ file packets explaining why I was wrong. Even though it was lies it takes forever to painstakingly prove 40 pages of lies. Eventually the bank doesn't want to deal with it anymore, there's a committee that spends maybe 10 or 15 minutes on your case and it takes 400 pages of truth to disprove 40 pages of lies, and denies your dispute and you have to sue.

The best part is the pirates made the username 'piratearrgggghhhh@hotmail.com' or something to that effect as well as a tracking number for something shipped (to my city) an entire day before the purchase date and ebay included that in their discovery packet.... and ebay suspended the seller account for fraud .... I still lost lol.

It seems possible that (since they've already reached the point of paying), the seller will go ahead and ship the order. Maybe the customer service rep (CSR) is just a very imprecise communicator and means to do the dispute if a problem does arise.

(Other signs that the CSR is an imprecise communicator: (1) they called the suspension "indefinite" at one point and "permanent" at another, but these are different things, and (2) they said "all" new members get suspended, but they may have meant this happens fairly often and is pretty routine.)

Another possibility is that the CSR simply didn't pay close attention and try to understand the situation. When the customer said they wanted to check the status, I think they meant it literally. They don't know that there's necessarily a problem yet, but they want to be able to check. The CSR may have concluded that the customer has an actual issue with never receiving the product.

I had a case recently where a company recommended that I kick off a credit card dispute. But it was because the company was calling in the administrators, and therefore they wouldn't have any reputation or assets very soon anyway.

They've got enough volume to absorb the occasional dispute.

Companies as large as eBay can make the credit card processor eat disputes as part of the agreement to use them (just like Costco is large enough to make Visa eat the entire credit card processing cost to have the Costco card).

They don't absorb it.

I was the victim of credit card fraud and someone set up another ebay account under my name, which then "bought" items from yet a second fraudulent ebay seller as a way to collect the ill-gotten credit card funds. I disputed the fraud with my bank.

eBay fucking PILED and PILED on the paperwork to my bank, both at the initial and every appeals step I used to attempt to win the dispute. Fought them tooth and nail over a few hundred bucks. I ended up losing because they had a legal department going ham to make sure I would lose the credit card dispute where they had lawyers working 40+ hours a week vs whatever time I have on the side to fight a few hudred bucks. If you file a dispute with ebay it is like filing a dispute against an army of lawyers, good luck.

"Absorb" here doesn't mean "they won't fight it", it means they'll have a manageable chargeback rate that doesn't risk them getting cut off from credit card processing.

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