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| Stamps.com gets a chargeback by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 04/10/2014, 3:33pm PDT | ||||
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| While on-line with Wells Fargo to determine how much Commerce Payment Systems had charged me in fees for the merchant account they decided to un-issue me, I discover that yesterday, April 9, Stamps.com has charged my corporate Visa check card $16 ($15.99 to be exact) as a monthly recurring fee.
Oh no. I didn't realize I had ordered a monthly subscription. I never used the service because I decided to try a "real" postage meter. (You can't mail anything over 13 ounces with stamps unless you take it to a counter agent at a post office.) You can mail anything from home or your office no matter what size it is (up to the 70 pound limit) as long as it's metered. Now, you can actually go to the U.S. Postal Service's website and print labels with postage for packages, and charge postage to your credit card, so there's really no reason to pay Stamps.com $15.99 a month. So I called up Stamps.com and select the option to cancel my account. After waiting on hold I give my information and I indicate I find the fee is essentially more than Pitney Bowes would charge me to have one of their meters. (Which I don't plan to keep after the 60-day trial anyway, I don't do enough volume to justify paying for a meter.) Well they have an option where they'll waive the fee while you have a postage meter account, but to get that you have to agree to a bunch of things including not renewing the meter once the contract expires and it's just too much trouble and too many hoops to jump through, so I just want to cancel the service. But, apparently I will be billed yet another monthly fee when cancelling. And no, I can't get the fee that Stamps.com already charged me reversed even though I never used the service and didn't even realize I'd signed up for a subscription. So I said to the woman, "Fine. I'm filing a chargeback." and hung up. Then I called the customer service number on the back of my Wells Fargo Visa Debit card. I then explained I gave the merchant a fair opportunity to cancel this charge as I did not realize I had subscribed to anything and did not intend to do so. So I wanted to file a chargeback for the transaction. In the interim Wells' website has logged me off for inactivity. (I don't mind this, it protects me against my account being accessible for a long time). So I log back in and discover in the interim, Stamps.com has added insult to injury by adding a second monthly service charge for $16 and it has shown up as a pending transaction. The woman on the phone at Wells Fargo explains they can't cancel or dispute a pending transaction until it actually posts. I said I understood, it's like, if you go to a gas station and pay at the pump, since the pump doesn't know how much gas you're going to buy it posts a pending transaction for $75 then when you actually shut off the pump it runs the actual transaction for the metered amount of fuel. So call back tomorrow when the transaction actually posts and I can dispute it then, and she appreciated that I was understanding about how it works. So now Stamps.com will get a $25 chargeback because they wanted to fight a $16 charge. Which they will lose because it's not a signed transaction. As the woman on the phone at Wells' said, when I couldn't think of the word, that some places are so "arrogant." That was the exact perfect word, and I thanked her. This is what Stamps.com gets for not giving agents the authority to waive a dissatisfied customer's charge, especially when I never used their service. If Stamps.com had some sort of "pay as you go" service where you purchase a block of postage then deducts the amount of postage from your order plus, say, a 10% fee for usage under $5, so a 49c stamp would cost 54c, and you have to purchase at least $10, $20 or $30 in postage in advance, that I wouldn't mind. But not this system. |
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Stamps.com gets a chargeback by 04/10/2014, 3:33pm PDT  Holy shit please stop posting the minutae of your sad budget online. NT by 04/10/2014, 4:43pm PDT Re: Holy shit please stop posting the minutae of your sad budget online. by 04/10/2014, 10:19pm PDT Re: Stamps.com gets a chargeback by 04/10/2014, 8:56pm PDT Re: Stamps.com gets a chargeback by 04/10/2014, 10:17pm PDT |
