It’s very difficult to win chargebacks. And at the end of the day, there is a not so small possibility that the package was stolen after it was left at the door, as I understand is pretty common in the US. And it is the responsibility of the seller to ensure that the buyer gets their package. So if possible and if it doesn’t cost that much, try to get the signed package option, although even that isn’t a sure thing against chargebacks.

With chargebacks, it’s very difficult to win against a buyer. I’ve had cases where I’ve sold a big 700 dollar product, shipped from Korea to Germany, and the customer claims that I shipped the wrong product and started a chargeback. So I asked him to ship it back, knowing that I had already lost the shipping fee in shipping it to him, but at least comforted by the fact that he would have to spend money in shipping it back to me. Well, it turns out that he shipped me back some garbage, some old books. I went to PayPal and they told me that they could reimburse me if I could get a police report, which was not that easy to do, since there was no physical evidence that I could show the police to prove what happened, but I was able to convince a detective to just get me a report. After I sent it to PayPal, I did end up getting reimbursed, but they told me that they had to pay back the buyer anyway and reimbursed me on their dime, which I thought was pretty cool.

I’ve been doing ecommerce as a small family business for almost 25 years now, our AOV is around US$300, and in all that time, I’ve had plenty of customers threaten to sue because of one reason or another, but no one has come close to actually suing. It’s all talk.

If you want to do ecommerce for a living, you’re going to have to grow much thicker skin very quickly.