My anecdotal experience from EU is that no-one even knows chargebacks exists or how it works and if this was turned into a transparent honest insurance, prompted via a question on the payment terminal/online checkout such as "Do you want to pay 1-3% to insure this purchase?" the vast majority of people would click no on the vast majority of purchases because there is already inherent trust involved between the merchant and the shopper.
Now add the chargeback pains that merchants go through for credit card frauds and you have what appears to be a sickly system where both shoppers and merchants lose, with the only winners being visa/mastercard & the acquiring and issuing banks they cooperate with.
If I buy a burger from a restaurant and its bad, i tell all my friends and i don't go back. I don't need insurance.
If I buy a service on steam, i already trust valve fully for those smaller amount sizes, I don't need insurance.
My gut feeling is that >99,9% of purchases made via payment cards are not relevant to insure meaning following the simpler risk model of cash for those would work just fine.
The point is it’s punititive to the merchant. You’re incentivised to avoid them pretty much at all cost
and for large transactions, most wont use a credit card (like buying a house)
On the other hand, credit cards are something else. Those are essentially short-term loans that are insured. As there are many parties involved that profit from you use of these, there indeed is a lot of protection in this case. But credit cards are very niche part of online card payments and mostly it is a USA thing.
Nailed it. Anyone can move money.
As a consumer, I always opt to pay for credit card where available. The safeties provided to me facilitated by everyone in the network – from issuer to acquirer and everyone in between – is exactly why. I don't want to consider waiting 12 months in line at small claims to get back $200 sent over Interac for services that were never provided by a shoddy business owner.
The cost of those consumer safeties and convenience is incurred by the merchant. This is the cost of business.
This "insurance" could be offloaded to a neutral third party that isn't controlled by the credit cards. Often, you purchase additional protection insurance on your big ticket items. This could easily be extended to cover whatever credit cards would have been relied upon in the past.
I had not considered this. My first thought is how technically and operationally complex it would be for an insurer to underwrite these transactions "on-the-fly" from merchants they don't know, but it is probably a great idea.
That's because they compete with credit card companies today. Make them more popular and I bet their costs would come down.
That cost is a minimum of 100% passed on to the consumer.