Why I'll never use Affirm again

Your arguement is that Affirm should be able to clip the ticket and hold no responsibility for their client fufilling their duties?

The charge back goes to who you paid for a service, if they need to pass it on, it's for them to do.

I think that's Affirm's wheelhouse, providing smaller merchants of largish ticket items an easy way to do financing. So OP may not have had an option outside of Affirm to do the financing.

I'm not sure how much Affirm would care about the issue as they're pretty much a 3rd party to the entire situation. But, yeah, I think the order of operations here would be: call merchant, call Affirm, then call credit card.

I don't believe charging back the loan provider had any outcome to getting their product/service.

Affirm was the wrong target.

Companies like yours make it hard for customers to reach capable representatives and routinely break service promises. Because hey! who cares if we have treated people decently? it has nothing to do with the business model.

There must be dozens of ways to ensure your customer service systems treat people properly, and you're clearly doing none of them.

Don't fix this case, fix your systems.

How do you plan to fix THAT.

If you're not already using NPS surveys after customer interactions and then looking at the detractors on how to improve your service, you should start now. Could be really enlightening.

There’s a way to provide cost optimized customer service that doesn’t put the burden on the customer to drive the process.

Their email to me saying they would be materially disadvantaged and blah blah blah got met with a response telling them to fuck off, stop emailing me and that I was reporting them to my bank for merchant fraud (which I did).

Problem solved. It's all fun and games until they risk losing their ability to process credit cards.

When a problem happens, it is "nobody's" fault. But your credit gets destroyed though.

But considering how this particular situation went as-is, I doubt Affirm would handle that request in any useful manner. Then again, I feel like this was a bit of an unusual situation that Affirm's customer service people were not well-equipped to handle (most people probably don't send chargebacks to Affirm), but perhaps Affirm does have a playbook for cases where a customer pays for something that isn't delivered.

So I'd agree that Affirm might not be the most appropriate target for a chargeback in this instance, but there might not be other options to get the merchant to send the goods. OP should have at least contacted Affirm before issuing the chargeback, though, since that's something of a nuclear option.

My car loan processor accidentally double charged my $5k loan payoff (and it didn't bounce). Customer support told me the only way to get back my money quickly would be to report fraud through my bank on the 2nd charge, which I did and the 2nd charge was returned within 2 business days. Then several weeks later I get snail-mail confirmation that my loan had been paid off and a certificate indicating this, along with a check for $5k from the lender. I called their customer support but they told me they are sorry but unfortunately since the account was already marked as paid out and those funds disbursed, I would "have" to keep it, so I gladly cashed the $5k check thereby getting my final $5k payoff of my vehicle for free thanks to the lender's mistakes.

Under the hood raising a chargeback means your bank send the acquiring bank a message (with an exponent and evidence) that immediately reverts the original transaction and transfers money from the acquirer to the customers bank.

The merchant via the acquirer can then issue a message that does the opposite, again with an explanation and evidence. Eventually the card network steps in and makes a final decision, but they charge a significant fee to do this, strongly encouraging the parties to resolve the situation between themselves.

More importantly there is no “win” message or “give up” message. Instead there’s a set period of time each party is allowed to send a reversing message, after that time period the last person to send a message “wins”.

The periods of time involved are significant, ranging from 30 to 90 days depending on where in the process you are. As a result the bank could well say they’ve given up on the chargeback, and allowed the merchant to win. But the merchant can’t be sure of that until the countdown timer on a reversal has expired.

To make things even worse, most bank employees have no idea how payments actually work. They may well be looking at a tool that says they’ve “reversed” the chargeback. But under the hood that could just mean their system won’t send any further messages, allowing the other party to eventually win.

I don’t like doing it, but that works pretty well to get things moving.

Admittedly this is not how most people are using Affirm, but it's definitely been useful to me in that way.

For every person using this to their advantage as a credit tool, I bet there are a dozen who are just sinking deeper into their debt quick sand.

Quoting on-demand loan pricing with clearer upfront payment amounts is more intuitive to consumers than “putting it on the credit card”.

Also for bigger purchases, it's better than a credit card. I pay my Amex balance off every month, but during the pandemic I used Affirm to purchase a home gym setup, and paid it over the course of 6 months at a much lower interest rate.

They are definitely not predatory in my view, but I don't have the perspective of a low-income person anymore.

Might as well just go with your bank itself, instead of adding another 3rd party merchant into the mix.

This depends on the timing of your transaction and your statement date. If you purchase something 1 day before your statement date, and you don't pay it off that same day, you will accrue interest.

Asked and answered? Majority of Americans have credit cards. An awful lot still don’t, and have shit financial situations that make getting one pretty hard. This is a widely documented phenomenon.

Agreed about them being predatory. They literally lose money for every person that uses their service in the recommended/correct way, and only make money when someone flubs a payment.

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

The sad truth is that looking poor in the US is culturally frowned upon, which often drives people to overextend their credit in order to fit in. People are quite often encouraged through advertising to improve their status through consumption in the short term at the expense of the long term. It's heinous, but that's America for you.

I really agree though, buy now pay later seems like a huge fiscal trap. Employment is at will and you have no guarantee about what tomorrow holds so it's good to try and live within your budget whenever possible... this doesn't really go for housing and the like though since those costs are so astronomical you're going to be gambling with debt no matter how long you save first.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/

Then there’s buyers who just use chargebacks as a way to get free stuff. Buyer asks for a refund, seller asks for it back (even offering to pay for shipping), buyer says no and issues a chargeback.

Simple: Regulations with teeth.

There's a reason why this kind of service isn't popular in Europe - not just are us Europeans more averse to debt in general and our banking doesn't rely on paper checks (which eliminates payday loan services and other check-associated bullshit), but one of the core benefits that the EU provides to its citizens is consumer protection. The EU parliament doesn't have much else under its authority which is immediately visible to every consumer, so they put in an extra effort to make life in the EU easier.

Affirm is a unicorn and IPO'd in 20221. It has quite a few competitors in the BNPL space like Klarna and Afterpay. So far they all lose a lot of money.

I had a couple cases where in one situation bank and another a business claimed I owed them and it would show up on my credit report. I didn’t pay either.

North ever showed up.

I have, however, seen Affirm's other scummy side -- they have a special 'workflow' with a partnership with Katapult, a lease-to-own provider, where the merchant can take an Affirm denial and push it to Katapult for an even more predatory rent-to-own loan at higher rates.

To put it another way, if you don't take advantage of 0% APR financing, you are effectively paying a surcharge to not have to deal with the additional complexity/risk of investing/financing/dealing with credit agencies. It's not clear to me at all you are getting your money's worth as a result of paying that higher price.

Fractional reserve banking is slanted to benefit people who take out debt and companies like Affirm allow somebody who may not be in the market for a Home or a Car to leverage their creditworthiness. Not using your available credit is not much different than keeping your cash under your bed instead of in an investment vehicle. People are just responding to the incentives created by central bankers and do bizarre yet rational things like take out loans for things they can afford out of pocket.

They threatened to report this to a credit rating agency. At any given time it's probably not a big deal assuming 1) you don't need to replace your car or sign a lease or get a personal loan around that time and 2) you know that you can dispute negative marks on your credit report and you know how to do that.

I didn't know how to do that until I had my identity stolen and I'm definitely more credit savvy than most from my cc churning days