Edit: [1] Not weird as in weird on Stripe's part, but weird as from the perspective of someone who does not sell online, just seems like this one-size-fits-all approach probably makes a lot of low-margin selling really hard.
A 7% chargeback rate is huge and would likely get you shutdown by your credit card processor.
Out of ~2500 orders I've had one chargeback and it was our fault for not processing the customer's refund sooner. I'm not open to disclose what we sell but I can promise you that I have some very angry customers.
Maybe you're confusing refunds with chargebacks?
Sick of it all I finally got minFraud setup and working with Braintree as the payment processor. So now, I use Braintree to authorize the card, then do a fraud check through minFraud. If the fraud level is low enough, I submit the payment for settlement, otherwise I void it.
Since putting minFraud in place I haven't had any chargebacks.
minFraud is a very cost effective service. We have them as one of the solutions in our platform.
If you read around on retail forums, you'll find that nobody would be able to get away with anything close to a 7% chargeback rate with traditional credit card processing, without getting their merchant account terminated with severe prejudice -- anything more than a percent or so raises alarm bells with the card companies.
Also, selling at $1 you're only going to make $0.67 or so per transaction (maybe less depending on how you get bilked in fees). You're going to have to do a lot of volume to make money selling at $1.
So you might trigger some flags with the card associations if you say have the following
1) 1% chargeback ratio 2) 1% of revenue result in chargeback 3) Have like 50-100 (forget exact number) of chargebacks a month for like x consecutive months.
If you don't fix the problem, then bad things happen like additional fines....etc.
So for merchants with very low volume, a higher chargeback rate is sometimes permissible. Acquiring banks have their own risk assessment so they may allow it or may not.