That's not even remotely true. The merchant absolutely has the ability to dispute chargebacks.
Often they will side with the consumer and will refund the charges through their various policies, but they also investigate the case and will let the payment go through if there's no actual problem found. There are plenty of cases where consumers didn't even contact the merchant at all and yet still chargeback.
That is actually not true. The credit card company must follow established guidelines and pragmatically look at the available information/user agreement/contract and decide on whether there was a breach of contract. They can not blindly stick the bill to the business.
Source - happened to me. Ended up relationship with both the merchant and credit card company. And have $2k less in my wallet.
The merchant is stuck with more than the tab. There's also a chargeback fee, which can range from around $15 to several times that depending on who they use for payment processing.
> Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally.
Sometimes it means that the customer didn't even try to resolve the dispute. At one place I worked we always gave a refund when one was requested, with no hassle. Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.
I think that because some companies make it a major hassle to get them to issue a refund, some consumers try to do a chargeback first and only call the merchant if the bank requires them to try to settle the issue directly first.
I was always under the impression that if consumers did this sort of thing too often it would end up hurting them because the CC company would start to flag their account.
Sort of an algorithmic version of "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."