king_of_goats

It's both, but mostly the latter. Purely from a time-management standpoint, doing the menial clerical work of compiling all the information requiring to properly respond to a dispute -- like some kind of courtroom lawyer assistant preparing for a boring case -- is just alien to how I want to spend my time as an entrepreneur. I'd rather just click "Accept", move past it, and focus my efforts on GROWING the business -- not engaging in these trivial disputes.

FYI -- I directly asked Stripe support, is there any downside to having a default policy of "Accepting" all disputes? Does my "accept-to-challenge" ratio have any impact on my account standing, risk profile, likelihood of getting banned, etc? They said, nope! Just focus your efforts on keeping your dispute rate ITSELF low. The resolution rate is irrelevant.

I see literally no benefit to challenging the disputes, assuming you don't care about getting the money back and would rather not waste the time/energy on the challenge process.

The ONLY thing I might be getting wrong in my case is this: Perhaps Stripe has some kind of "internal monitoring" metrics that tracks how users respond to disputes, and maybe there's some kind of "accept vs. challenge" ratio they use to assess account standing and risk likelihood. If that is the case, my assumptions may be wrong here and this may be the wrong strategy. Would love to hear input from somebody at Stripe on this question. Wasn't the Stripe cofounder crawling around on this site last week answering some questions? Where's he at now? lol

I'm not saying "yeah let's rebel and keep doing it!" or anything like that; now that I'm aware of this I'll be ultra-careful going forward.

My point is -- it seems absurd that people WOULD get their account banned for a couple of trivial test payments. And since this practice seems so widespread in the software developer / entrepreneur community, I think these doomsday soothsayers telling us that your account WILL get banned if you do this are clearly overstating how serious this is and how aggressively it's policed and cracked down on by PPs like Stripe.

Absolutely makes sense to have something like that, for genuine scammers, mass offenders, etc. But being but on that list for a few measly test payments to make sure your software is working properly? That to me sounds LUDICROUS.