Stripe

Hi Jon, I'm sorry that you're having trouble with disputes -- they can be frustrating! Unfortunately, when your customer initiates a dispute with their bank, it's the bank that begins an investigation and makes the determination on who gets to keep the funds -- and often times, they do favor the customer. This process is facilitated by credit card networks, but Stripe helps with this process by submitting evidence that you provide, such as tracking numbers. Although we can't make disputes go away, we do try our best to make them a bit easier to manage. As a bit of background on how the dispute process works, the minute that we learn about a dispute from your cardholder's bank, the funds and an additional fee are taken out of our account. In the event that you're able to win a dispute, we return the full amount of the charge and the fee to you, though the fee that we are assessed is not returned to us by the bank. We return that fee because we feel strongly that businesses shouldn't be penalized for disputes that are resolved in their favor. Because it is expensive for us to return those fees in instances were the dispute is resolved in the business's favor, we aren't able to return the fees at other times. In addition, since disputes are a forced refund by the cardholder’s bank and not a voluntary one on your part, you remain responsible for the processing fees for the initial transaction. It can be tricky for even experienced businesses to understand how to handle a dispute, so we've spent time documenting the various circumstances under which a payment can be disputed, and how best to handle each -- I'd recommend taking a look at https://stripe.com/help/disputes to learn more. Please also take a look at https://stripe.com/help/disputes#how-can-i-prevent-disputes to learn more about preventing disputes. I hope this helps shed some light on our approach here. Again, I'm sorry that dealing with disputes are frustrating. Stripe actively dedicates resources to making this problem better and, over time, go away entirely. We can certainly look into your account and these specific disputes, if you'd like, if you send us a message at https://support.stripe.com/email.