Disputing a charge just because you don't immediately know what it is, is not a good idea. At least, not if you want to continue doing business with the vendor that made the charge. Companies tend to take a dim view of people issuing chargebacks.
That's an interesting perspective. I take a dim view of companies charging my card incorrectly. Particularly Amazon since they submit many separate charges for items within a a single order, making it virtually impossible to verify the charges.
I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening.
I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
There was a somewhat recent case of someone having their amazon account with all their media they purchased licenses to view via their Amazon account taken away from them permanently for issuing a charge back due to some disputed activity on their account. So, before you go around issuing charge backs, you should think of the consequences of disputing your account status with that merchant. You may end up losing access to ALL your Steam games just because some kid cracked your password and purchased a $1 game with your account. This is the danger of having an account on these digital distribution sites everyone seems to be so fond of. Sure, you can download your movies without having to leave your house to go to Blockbuster, but what do you do when you get your entire account locked on the Microsoft Zune Marketplace because of one charge? You could lose your entire iTunes library because you failed to recognize one charge that your kid made without your permission. Any such event could (and very well may) actually cut you off from your entire media library while you resolve your situation, if you actually manage to solve it. What if someone cracks your Battle.NET account and uses your copy of World of WarCraft to run a gold farming bot or a cheating script, and now you lose access to your entire Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House funds. You could literally have thousands of dollars taken away from you without it being your fault in the slightest. You know, provided you have a time machine and go back to 2013 when the D3 RMAH was actually a thing. In any case, this is a real danger where you can lose a lot of value over a simple charge back, and there is little to protect you from this retaliatory account locking that distributors of digital goods are so fond of lording over us plebs. Again, this is a serious issue. Do consider it whenever you think about issuing a charge back on your accounts. Now, the more faithful a customer to a digital distributor you are, the more you get screwed over by complaining about them mistakenly charging you for things you didn't purchase, or other such situations where you are forced to issue a charge back because you couldn't get the vendor to resolve an issue with the money they charge you for transferring some data to your system. I won't even touch the discussion on how physical media cost the same as the digital access despite the obvious lack of printing the medium, producing it, shipping it, warehousing it, displaying it in a store, securing it in the store, advertising it in the store, and selling it via a cashier. Running the download and billing servers has to be several orders of magnitude less expensive, not to mention that some distributors (Blizzard) use peer to peer downloads to make you distribute the software for them in addition to downloading it. And somehow they are the same price. Go figure.
My original comment actually included a bit about how common knowledge is that Valve can and does lock you out of your Steam account if you issue a chargeback, but I decided not to include it because it's really just hearsay (I don't know anyone personally who has experienced this).
Seconded. On the rare occasion that I will dispute a charge, I am one hundred percent sure I did not initiate it before contacting my card issuer. If I think there was an error rather than fraud, I'll always try to work it out with the merchant first rather than risk my welcome to do business with them in the future.
FWIW, in principle I agree with both points being made, but in practice I just didn't want to be responsible for following the issue and making sure it got resolved correctly. I wanted to hear "oops, leave it to us" and then stop thinking about it.
Perhaps worth adding, I was/am 99% sure how the charge occurred, and that it was a Heisenbug from when I'd trialled Prime. So there was no question of punishing them for being a bad vendor, I just needed them to bounce the issue around until it landed on someone who could fix it (which is essentially what happened).
I think the real root cause of situations like this is that social teams sometimes have more/better options for escalating issues than customer support does.
That was not the case here though. Amazon probably said to dispute it because that is the way to get it to the right people. The advantage of that from your prospective is the CC company takes over with dealing with Amazon for you and it's off your shoulders.
