I actually like the idea of chargeback protection. I used to process disputes for a regional bank and sometimes customers dispute shit for the dumbest reasons. To make it worse, we still had to send it to the merchant and they may lose the full amount because they don't argue their case well enough, even though we know the customer is being petty.
This is basically an insurance policy for a monthly fee as PayPal will manage the dispute responses which can be time consuming, and won't charge the merchant for a legitimate refund.
Fuck them for the fee increase though, they're basically a dinosaur compared to other payment options these days; there's no reason for them to charge more for their awful services.
I would guess that losing the eBay fee stream probably hurt. But yes, chargebacks are a bitch and people are terribly petty.
I've only had to do that twice in my credit life, and one of those was because the merchant decided they were going to suddenly start pre-authing all charges at full value before making the real charge, and didn't tell anyone. I saw a suspicious charge after I received the merch and thought I got hacked, but it was just the merchant making the actual charge.
The other time was for a merchant that was being an ass about a defective product, refused to even consider that it arrived defective, and essentially told me to where to go. I went to Chase who was happy to help. Mostly...
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