This is great. I've never actually had a customer dispute a charge through Stripe, but if it happened, I wouldn't be able to challenge it before (I only charge $10 at a time, so it would have been cheaper to just accept it). This always concerned me because it left the possibility that a customer could go back and dispute the last year's worth of charges and there's nothing I could do. This happened once when I used Amazon FPS to process payments, and I was forced to just let the customer take $120 from me. I know it's not much money, but it's really discouraging when you do everything you can to be up-front about billing, (monthly payment notifications, no-question refunds, easy cancellations) and then you have to accept frivolous chargebacks which is basically admitting to the bank that you did something wrong.
Just FYI, with most CC processors, chargeback fees are in addition to reversing the original charge. So you would be out $25 if you were to get a chargeback. And if you won you would get the $10 back but still loose the $15 chargeback fee putting you at -$5 overall (that's not even including transaction fees that stack on top of everything).
Most CC companies have a 90 day limit on charges that can be contested. Amex is the only one that I know of that goes further back (1 year IIRC but it may be longer).
Stripe has decided to change that and will refund the $15 if you win. It's a nice change but in my experience the vendor rarely reverses chargebacks.
I've gotten Visa chargebacks as far back as 7 months after the fact. It was a surprise when it happened as I had thought 6 months was the limit, since 180 days appears quite often in merchant account agreements as a hold period for various issues.
I did some brief searching and it seems like the time limit depends on several things (including type and amount of charge and physical location of the vendor). It could be as little as 45 days or as long as 540.
It's definitely become more common to get chargebacks over the years. Part of this is increased volume on our part and part of it is the CC companies becoming more consumer friendly.
I agree that this won't make much practical difference.
I think it depends on the chargeback reason code. If the chargeback was due to fraudulent reasons, merchants have very little chance of having it reversed. Now, they may be able to fight it and win based on procedural reasons relating to the chargeback dispute process. Not something worth doing though for most merchants.
Sometimes, its more costly in time to fight a chargeback than the fee that is imposed. Many merchants just let it go and eat the costs.
