One of my users is claiming that her card was used without her knowledge to sign up for my membership program via PayPal. PayPal offers three ways for me to respond: 1) I shipped the item and have a tracking number 2) I did not ship and will refund 3) I have refunded Not much options for an electronically delivered membership program. Okay, so I guess PayPal is telling me to bite it but given how much of their transaction volume must be electronic goods, surely these are not acceptable options to provide a vendor. No, I'm not surprised. it would be "polite" if they allowed me to provide access logs, even if they rejected them, I'd feel somewhat better but like many other payment processors I guess the fact is that vendors of electronic goods have to take a hit even though, in my experience, this is usually somebody lying to get a refund having used the service. I'd appreciate hearing from other amember users with suggestions based on their past experiences.
I have offered a subscription based service not dealing in tangible goods at all and it's always a pain when this occurs though thankfully not very often. I completely agree with you that PayPal does not offer merchants such as yourself nor I much to go on but I believe if you hunt through their help section you will find an email address for them you can send your direct response to referencing the dispute id#. Sorry, I don't have it offhand. On a side note, I started my site with PayPal subscriptions(utilizing the paypal_r plugin) with a standard PayPal account but have since started using PayPals website payments pro(paypal_pro plugin) which PayPal handles a bit differently when there is a dispute...there does see to be more options available to the seller in disputes concerning those transactions than what it is showing to you which I am assuming is a basic PayPal account.
If its a digital product, refund them and move on. Lock them out from ordering again. If its a 2nd or 3rd payment on a digital product- Ive won those. But its usually a member who wants a refund- so i cancel them, refund them, and send them an email explaining how bad it is for a merchant to get this sort of claim, so that next time they contact the seller for the refund. David
I just wanted to echo David on this one because dealing correctly with these is so important. Whenever I get one of these Paypal claims (or even an authorize.net chargeback) on a subscription, I do exactly what David does. As a bonus, often the formerly irritated customer replies back thanking you and expressing amazement at your excellent customer service. That's a heck of a lot better than having a former customer who was so mad that they resorted to a claim/chargeback. Those are the ones who post bad things about you on forums and blogs.