HN Explorer

When are Lyft and Uber going to add a “refund” button within their app?

41 points by julien421 ↗ HN
This morning - once again - I got charged 5usd for cancelling a ride even though I had good reasons to do so. This happens too many times because of Lyft/Uber's fault, not mine:

- I cancel a ride because the driver goes in the opposite direction - The app keeps showing 2/4 mins and it's been 10+min I have been waiting - Drivers calling me to ask to cancel the ride - ...

If I want to get a refund, I need to spend too much time: DM + email -> https://twitter.com/julienbarbier42/status/959105112223264768 + wait for the refund to show on my bank account. (note: when I do ask for refund I always get it, the customer support is nice with me, all the time).

When it comes to paying Lyft/Uber, this is automatically done, they don't have to send me a DM and email to ask me to pay them for the service I used. Why would we have to spend so much time to get reimbursed for a service that we did NOT use?

Please Lyft/Uber, add a button "refund" WITHIN the app. You technically can EASILY do it. It should be as easy to get reimbursed than to be charged. Of course, you can review complains / claims, but I should not have to spend that much more time asking for reimbursement, especially when I right, I am a customer for a long time, I already have a good track record, and all claims I made in the past were confirmed by your team.

Why is this not already done?

39 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread
nxsynonym
It would leave too much room for fraudulent or abusive behavior. Would exponentially increase the time their claims/customer service team has to spend digging through refunds to sort the real ones from the bs.

As a bad customer: I don't like the drivers name - refund. I thought the driver was too slow - refund. I just want to see what I can get away with - refund.

Believe it or not, most people will exploit systems to the fullest extent.

ajford
Exactly! As for the driver calling to ask you to cancel, that should be on him. He should cancel, not the customer. That seems like a scam from his end. Trying to up his numbers, or keep from getting the ding from the cancellation.
nibnalin
The problem with this method is that when I tried it, the driver just agreed to come, and I wasted 15-20 minutes to get a ride that had a wait time of 4-5 minutes.

Moreover, with drivers rating riders now, I’m quite sure the driver gave me a poor rating(so did I, but this exercise is just counterproductive really)

benologist
Completely false. Steam's offered a 2-week refund window ever since their criminal no-refund policy [1] was called to a judge's attention in Australia and the end result is a very low refund rate - just 6% for Rust [2].

Google Play for years now have had a 2-hour window where you can reverse purchases too just by going back to the store page and pressing the cancel button. I think the vast majority of developers aren't even aware of it.

It's very easy to detect consumer abuse of such a policy at the store-level. But I don't think consumers in general are trying to fuck companies. Darkpatterns.org exists to point out how willfully the opposite is true, Uber are just being thieves and they will be held accountable for it and a refund button will appear but not until they've stolen millions more.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/video-gam...

[2] https://www.pcgamesn.com/rust/rust-refund-stats-sales-number...

nxsynonym
Steam and Google play are much different services and user bases.

I'd also like to see comparative transaction amounts before you claim "completely false".

benologist
About half of Uber's users come directly from the Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubercab

Do you have any examples of companies suffering unfairly from refunds because consumer protection laws have made them mandatory for a long list of reasons in many countries for decades already.

nxsynonym
User downloads != transactions. A user can download the app once and conduct hundreds of transactions.

Refunds still exist, and are honestly easy to request. My point is that there is most likely a very strong product/business decision as to why there isn't a "get my money back now" button in the app.

wyldfire
> Believe it or not, most people will exploit systems to the fullest extent.

I don't believe it. It's hardly most people. But I would grant that it is many people.

nxsynonym
Weather it's most or a lot, the noise generated in either case is enough to cause operational issues and bottleneck customer service for people who have genuine needs for refunds.
rhino369
I agree. The real problem is that app charges you after 5 minutes when the driver is nowhere near the pickup.

If the initial estimate is 2 min, and then the driver just drives in a different direction for 5 min, they shouldn't charge the 5 dollar fee in the first place. Especially since its now common for drivers to do this as a method of forcing riders to cancel to help their metrics.

Even if the driver is legit lost, that's still not the customers fault.

dllthomas
> Believe it or not, most people will exploit systems to the fullest extent.

But "the fullest extent" is the same in each case. Really, the issue is that there's a significant segment of the population that is willing to go to various degrees of effort to exploit a system.

tarentel
I have requested a refund because a driver asked me to cancel from the app. I'm on iOS but if you go Your Trips -> Find it -> I would like a refund. I was refunded in a very short amount of time from what I remember. edit: This is from the Uber app, not sure about Lyft.
tommoor
Yah, the couple of times I've needed to do this I got a refund within 10-15minutes. Not a big deal.
mnm1
I've done this on the Android app a few times and have always been denied by a human. Now I just issue a chargeback with the credit card and don't even bother to contact Uber.
chrisseaton
> Drivers calling me to ask to cancel the ride

Tell them to cancel it if they want it cancelled!

dllthomas
There is an option for "the driver asked me to cancel" in the "why I'm cancelling" drop down (or something to that effect).
ramenmeal
This is my biggest complaint with these apps as well, its a terrible experience and I'm surprised they haven't hashed it out yet. Generally I call the driver and tell them I won't cancel and sometimes it works. If it doesn't then I open up the other app and hope it doesn't happen again.
jon_richards
If uber charges you $5 and makes you spend an hour to reverse it, no one reverses it. Those $5 add up.
mnm1
They intentionally charge you the $5 because they are assholes who like to commit fraud. Dispute it with the credit card company. Don't even bother with Uber. Go straight to your credit card website and put a dispute on it as soon as it comes out of pending. I have not seen the fee with Lyft myself, but Uber's charging of fees is absolutely ridiculous. They claim to charge a fee after you've been waiting for a few minutes if you cancel, despite the fact that the only reason you've been waiting long enough to trigger the fee is because they are a bunch of fuckwads who can't provide decent service within a reasonable amount of time. The fee is fraud and you should treat it as such. As far as I can tell, the credit card companies do not even contact Uber anymore, they immediately refund you the money because they know it's fraud. Oh, and write your representatives, if you think that will make a difference--it won't.
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ikeboy
They do, go to trips, report a problem, request a refund or something.
EdJiang
Uber actually already does this on occasion. Request a refund from My Trips > Trip > I would like a refund. Depending on your reasoning, and the details of the trip, it may issue a refund automatically.

For a cancellation fee, I’ve definitely gotten an automatically issued refund in the past.

Disclosure: I work at Uber.

lhorie
Huh, I did not know about this. I just tried with a recently cancelled trip and it did issue an automatic refund. Only nit: the option that gave me the refund is called "Problem with cancellation fee", not "I would like a refund".

TIL, thanks!

chipmonkey75
Does this require or allow confirmation from the driver? I would think that an easy two-person agreement would make this super fast... you should only need to involve a central party if the (would-be) driver and passenger don't agree on the refund. (I suppose this would only matter in cases where the driver was already identified and involved, but still).
afrophysics1
Good middle-ground:

After matching with driver:

Wait 4 minutes.

if distance from driver >= initial distance from driver:

Pop up modal asks if you would like a refund, to be matched with a different driver, or to wait.

wccrawford
Alternatively, if you've already waited double the estimated time, do the same popup.
thinkythought
This would require them admitting their estimates are baloney, which will never happen
lhorie
The cancel->refund pattern falls under the umbrella of a dispute. Drivers don't want to drive 10 mins toward a rider and then see them cancel on a whim with no consequence. In a case like that, the rider made a commitment that they would pay some money, which would ultimately offset the cost of the driver driving to the pick up spot, so the driver would want things to be made right if the rider decided to cancel.

Determining who is right in each case requires human intervention. Human intervention costs money. In some cities, it costs A LOT of money. Someone has to pay for it. One solution would be to hide that cost in the price of all rides, but no company is going to do that if it means having higher prices than competitors across the board.

If it was more common that a driver is at fault in a cancellation than a rider, the default behavior of the app would logically be to refund. The fact that it is not tells you something about the incentives for all the parties involved and where the potentials for abuse lie.

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muthuraj57
Ola (similar to Uber/Lyft in India) have refund button and it works pretty well. One time I booked a ride and the driver cancelled it after 20 minutes because of traffic, but I got charged for that. The Ola app had refund option and I choose the reason "The driver cancelled the ride" and I got the money back (to Ola wallet).
ypeterholmes
This isn't just a $5 issue. My friend had a driver start a ride without her in the car, and then kept it going as they drove multiple hours to the tune of $650. The whole time we were trying to stop it but there was no option. Months of tweeting and emailing and calling later, they weren't budging. It wasn't until I started a Reddit thread asking why Lyft allows drivers to scam riders that they finally relented and refunded the money. Customer service!
clintonb
Months of tweeting? Next time just call your credit card issuer and have them do a chargeback.
[dead] warent
Hi Julien! I'm here to help! Send me a DM with your ride number, email address, credit card number, photo ID, and last three locations that you lived in.

EDIT: I see this joke was flagged. For what reason exactly? I was making a reference to OP's twitter conversations linked in the main thread. Which mod is getting flag happy here?

warent
This thread has 36 points and 26 comments in 40 minutes, but it's halfway down the second page somehow. Shouldn't this be on the front page? Is this being demoted by the mods for some reason?

EDIT: The thread was flagged apparently. For what?

darkstar999
Because Hacker News isn't Uber or Lyft customer service. Nothing good could come of this post.
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