Not sure what exactly they've dropped, but I know Amazon Payments haven't been accepting new crowdfunding sites for years. It's got to be a major fraud risk; the only reason they don't get more chargebacks is because most projects fail outside of the chargeback window offered by credit card companies.
The concept of chargebacks, as often applied in practice, seems absurd to me. If you have a credit card then you're also supposed to be a reasonably responsible adult. You shouldn't just get to use a mechanism intended for defense against theft and fraud just because you regret a purchase. Why can't the payment company simply accuse you of fraud when you attempt fraudulent chargebacks?
OK, here's an example of how chargebacks have worked in my favor.
I order a PC. Vendor happily takes my info and CC number. Few days later, no shipment information. Call vendor. They say it will be there in a week. A week later, no PC, call vendor. They say they have no idea when it will ship. I say cancel. They say, OK, but we have to charge you 15% restocking fee. I say "you're nuts. You haven't shipped anything, how can you charge a restocking fee for stock you never had? Cancel my fucking order." They say OK. I buy PC from other supplier and it arrives in a few days. A few days after that, I get a PC from the original vendor and find that they charged my card after all. I call Citibank, tell them the story, Citibank immediately reverses the transaction and tells me to send it back at vendor's expense and send them a copy of the shipping paperwork.
That's why you need chargebacks: for fuckwad vendors out to rip you off.
I find the usage of that phrase really interesting, because calling a contribution to a kickstarter a 'purchase' is exactly why people may feel entitled to a chargeback when the project goes casters-up and ceases contact with their customers. In their eyes, they purchased a certain product; the fact that it's not currently finished doesn't matter- they paid for it and expect to eventually get what they paid for.
Thought about this way (which is exactly how I believe the vast majority of people think), it is exactly like any other fraudulent purchase where the seller fails produce after payment.
Well to be fair, with most Kickstarters, a promise is made. You contribute $5, we thank you. You contribute $100, you get the product early. You contribute $1000, we fly out and thank you personally. The Kickstarter TOS might say something else, but in effect the purchaser did purchase something. Yes, they donated their money, but they were promised something in return.
I'm not sure I'm reading the tone of your comment correctly so I apologize if I'm just repeating what you said, but your use of the words "in their eyes" and "how the people think" makes it seem like you don't believe the same thing. If I back a project that promises X and they don't deliver, they took my money without delivering what they promised. I believe even Kickstarter themselves says that failed projects have to give the money back.
Yeah, I agree that the tone of my comment was difficult to understand. Mostly, this is due to the fact that what I described in my post, that people think they're buying a product, also occurs in my own mind every time I think about contributing to a Kickstarter campaign.
However, if I sit and think about it, I realize that what I'm doing is funding an idea. Kind of like donating to a political campaign. There's no promise that my chosen candidate will win, and if they don't I wouldn't expect my money back. Obviously, this analogy breaks down somewhat because whether a candidate wins an election is ultimately outside of their control. Whereas for a Kickstarter project, presumably the vast majority are possible to achieve 100% of the time as long as they don't screw up somehow. And that's not even considering the quality of the final product- that the game is fun, the fancy electronic gizmo isn't a cheap POS, etc. (This is obviously buyer's remorse, although one could also argue these are fraudulent too if they promise a "fun" game, or a gizmo that's not a POS.)
Either way, if you read the TOS for Kickstarter, they actually only require that projects do their best. If they fail, they have various outs to continue compliance with Kickstarter. One of those outs is explaining where everyone's money went, and why they aren't able to issue refunds. Of course, they also go on to say that backers may still seek legal action against them for a failed project, but in most cases these LLCs are probably out of business anyway at this point. Regardless, they're in the clear from Kickstarter's point of view.
Because the "security model" of credit cards involves shifting all seller-fraud risk onto the sellers using chargebacks. It's far easier—and good for business!—to trust customers' complaints 100% of the time, than it is to actually figure out whether a purchase is real or a spurious charge.
Especially now that virtual goods exist: as far as the credit card company can see from its vantage point, those are effectively spurious charges that the customer happens to say are okay.
> Because the "security model" of credit cards involves shifting all seller-fraud risk onto the sellers using chargebacks.
This is actually one of the two primary services that credit cards sell themselves on -- mitigating risk, primarily by protecting consumers from fraud, and permitting purchases on credit rather than out of available cash balances -- and its the feature that is most heavily sold to higher-end customers (the you can buy stuff you can't otherwise afford feature is sold more heavily, at least more equally to risk mitigation, to lower-end customers.)
