Yeah, Stripe only gets so much say over chargebacks with their platform provider and the cardholder's bank, the only platform that I've seen chargebacks successfully fought & won on is Tsys, its always a loser on First Data.

That being said, $15 is a low chargeback fee (damn close to cost the issuing bank & platform charge), generally you'll see a $25 to $30 chargeback fee with a $20 to $75 retrieval fee.

I had two chargebacks on my service using Stripe (https://breaker101.com/ </shameless-plug>), and successfully fought both of them. Just throwing that out there.

how does paypal handle these ? When there is a dispute, I refund the amount and thats it. Paypal bears the chargeback and Stripe passes it to the merchants ?

Software Engineering Daily had an episode[0] on fraud detection at stripe using machine learning. If you're interested it provides quite a bit of background information.

[0]: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/03/17/stripe-machi...

Paypal charges a $20 chargeback fee on disputes with a credit card company.

I use Stripe from Japan and it really sucks when it comes to chargebacks. I have won like 2 of 30 cases. I provide customer's ID, shipping labels, tracking info and still lose. I had one friendly fraud case, when a customer was using both Stripe and PayPal. Later the customer opened disputes for every payment made within 3 months. It was like dozens of disputes on both PayPal and Stripe. I have won all on PayPal and lost all on Stripe. Those two cases I won on Stripe was like the acquiring bank started the chargeback without notifying the client. The client worked with us, the acquiring bank admitted the mistake and still we had to fight to convince Stripe that we won the dispute. I strongly believe that they just automatically process the chargeback forms and don't give a thing about winning it. Not to mention that they charge you even if you win a dispute.