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Comment by jeromegv | Hacker News Reader

Companies want you to file the dispute through their support system using their existing process.

Once you file a dispute through the credit card company, the dispute process is moved to the credit card company and now the company has a LOT less power on what might be happening. They also get severely impacted from having a high amount of charge back and hurts them the next time they want to negotiate their credit card rate.

So from a market perspective, it makes total sense for a company to ban you. You're causing them problems, refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute, and hurt their bottom line in ways that could impact them at the rate of millions of dollar. They would rather not have you as a customer at all than deal with you again. Statistically, a customer that uses charge back is a lot likely to end up using it again, so they avoid themselves future trouble as well.

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He did follow BnB dispute procedure and gave them a chance to overrule the host's unreasonable stance. But BnB conspired with the host to screw him over and should bear the consequences.

Yes, and he should issue a chargeback, and then bear the consequences of AirBnB no longer doing any business with him in response.

A chargeback is the burn-all-the-bridges, fuck-you-pay-me nuclear option, and you will be banned from any business that you use it against. You should not use it against any business you intend to patronize in the future.

While a possibility given the weird nature of SV companies, it's also pretty much nonsense in general when company support systems break down. It's the sort of learned helplessness that some people promote relative to companies that seems pretty silly. I've certainly used chargebacks when something wasn't working and continued to deal with said companies, albeit rarely.

Yes, sometimes you need to break relationships with certain companies as well. But that should be fine in general.

> Yes, and he should issue a chargeback, and then bear the consequences of AirBnB no longer doing any business with him in response.

I struggle to think that a person should bear literally any consequences if they weren't in the wrong, which AIUI in this case he isn't.

Why do you think a non-monopoly business should be compelled to continue to serve a customer that does chargebacks against it?

You can fire that business as a vendor, they can fire you as a customer.

For the same reason we protect whistle-blowers; if a person has a reasonable problem with a business, we'd like to avoid the business retaliating because that creates incentives that protect bad actors.

> So from a market perspective, it makes total sense for a company to ban you.

From a contract point of view, merchants who ban consumers for charge backs are in violation of card association rules.

> refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute

The merchant agreed to accept charge back rulings when they signed their merchant agreement. The chargeback process is a pain for consumers - they have to do a quite a bit of paperwork to file one.

> Statistically, a customer that uses charge back is a lot likely to end up using it again

A business that forces consumers into charge backs and loses deserves the charge back. Consumers don't automatically win. Source: owned an MSP for about a decade.

BTW, Visa, MC, AMEX and others can fine and ban merchants who fail to comply with card association rules (including chargebacks). Likewise, card associations can also cancel cards on consumers who file abusive charge backs.

Not Home Depot. Their support representative was worthless for an online order that was never delivered (lost in transit). They advised me to do a charge back. Luckily, it was an online chat, so I screen capped that to add to the CC docs you have to submit.

Blows my mind; reshipping the item would (given they sell it for a profit) cost HD less than me doing a 100% chargeback, and it would be better customer service. I guess they use the friction of doing a chargeback to be their fraud prevention.

Oh my goodness, I had the exact same experience with Home Depot. But then they responded to the chargeback and said it was delivered and no going back and forth with American Express would get them to help. I closed my AmEx card and am deeply skeptical of doing business with Home Depot.

Haha, same here. A package was never delivered (though the tracking number said that it was). Home depot representative couldn't resolve the issue, and recommended to make a charge back. After I made a chargeback, HD contacted the bank with a supporting package (receipt, tracking number, etc) and reversed the charge back. At this point I decided not to waste any more time for $50 item and moved on.

> to add to the CC docs you have to submit.

The only time I made a charge back the CC company actively told me to not add any documentation.

> You're causing them problems, refuse to follow procedure on how to handle the dispute

It sounds to me like they refuse to follow the law.

How can they avoid future trouble by not refunding a 1 hour cancel? The next person who makes a similar mistake will chargeback too, unless they aren’t aware of it. For a company, the only way out of it is to stay within common sense, because that’s what all their clients have in common.

Their clients are the Hosts.

Silicon Valley scum relies on a lot of people not knowing their rights to open a dispute/chargeback. Seems to be a winning strategy considering even on here most people don’t seem to be aware of this option.

So we need to externally regulate this market... cool.

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