Hi all,
Dakota's post is most helpful here. The first couple of posts are confusing to me.
As a new merchant, I sometimes receive refund requests, and I want be nice and helpful to customers but at the same time, do not want to bare the costs as every transactions affecting the bottomline. I don't want to speak for LL here, but AFAIK, in RL, credit card companies do help merchants with refunds and not charging a transaction fee, because they want to encourge good customer services, and therefore more transactions in the future. Afterall, a good percentage is charged for every transaction the goes through, and therefore, enough to cover processing costs, fraud, insurance and other exceptions. I am not sure there is full automation for credit card companies in RL, so I think LL support case handling is appropriate, although some automation will be helpful to everyone include LL.
Just my 2cents