Not sure about OP’s costs, but I sell physical goods and have a similar attitude: I don’t want money from anyone who’s not delighted to give it to me. Most people are good most of the time and it works out fine.

I have had a couple of obvious scammers take advantage, but that’s on them to square with their conscience. Life’s too short to spend it fussing with folks like that.

I agree. I use to have rental property and when you evict someone you theoretically can go after them for back rent and fees. It could total well over $2000. But it wasn’t worth the hassle and you factor that possibility into the rent you charge.

Or as my southern grandfather use to say:

Don’t chase after old money or old girlfriends

I do have server expenses that map directly to processing work done for individual customers, so there is a quantifiable amount of real money lost at times. But at the end of the day, I still don't want somebody's fourteen dollars enough to fight them for it (even if it means I also lose another $5 in real expense and a few more in chargeback fees).

But you're absolutely right. If it were physical goods or services, I'd fight those chargebacks for sure. (Though it'd be a lot harder for one of my deadbeat customers to plausibly claim that he'd "forgot that I mowed his lawn").

Once a chargeback is filed you are losing the fee if you either accept it or don't fight it. My cancellation process is simple, certainly simpler than contacting your bank and identifying yourself and going through the chargeback process. That doesn't stop people from going to their bank for the last 3 months of subscription and calling them fraudulent because they never told us to cancel them. I fight every single chargeback because their always lies by the customer in my case and they involve real money already spent by my company. We win some and lose some.

People who sell physical goods bake the cost of these losses into their pricing. In fact, any large business will have financial analysts whose sole job is to calculate exactly how much they'll need to inflate their prices to make up for losses due to fraud, theft, accidents, and the like. It's kind of like being your own insurer, except the customer pays your premiums.

But I doubt that I could order $5000 worth of furniture, have it delivered, dispute the charges and then the vendor just shrugs.

But, I’ve never disputed charges outside of obviously being double charged. Most of the time, I’ll speak with vendor.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens with identity theft.

Imagine if someone stole your credit card number, ordered $5000 worth of furniture with it, had it delivered, and then you discovered the unauthorized purchases on your account and disputed the charge. The vendor has no choice but to just eat it.

It's unfortunate, but it happens, and the only way to mitigate it is to raise prices to offset this kind of losses.

That sucks. I didn’t think about it from the merchants side.