Disputes

Disputes are chargebacks raised at your payment provider and written into the admin by webhook.

A chargeback does not start with you. The customer goes to their bank, the bank goes to your provider, and the first you hear of it is the provider telling you it has happened.

The admin is therefore a mirror of the dispute, not the place the dispute lives. That distinction explains almost everything about how this page behaves.

Each dispute arrives attached to the order it was charged against, and carries:

• Its status
• Its amount
• Its evidence deadline

You will find the queue at:

Orders → Disputes

Attached to the order

A dispute belongs to an order.

That means the items, the totals, and — when the order has one — the customer are one click away, and the queue itself links straight to the order page.

It matters because a chargeback is an argument about a specific purchase. Whatever you are going to say in your defence comes from the order: what was bought, what it cost, what shipped, and when.

Read from the provider, not written here

Chargebacks are created, updated, and closed by provider webhooks.

You cannot raise one in the admin, and the status is not editable.

The only field you own is the assignee.

This is not a missing feature. The provider is the system of record for a dispute, and the bank decides the outcome. A status you could edit here would only be a second opinion — one that could disagree with the provider and be believed by your own reports.

Clear ownership

Assign a dispute to a team member, then filter the queue down to your own.

A chargeback with a deadline and no owner is the usual way one is lost. Assignment is the one thing the admin lets you change precisely because it is the one thing the provider cannot know.

What an open dispute freezes

While a chargeback is open, the order is held in place. Three things stop:

1. The order cannot be refunded.
2. The order cannot be fulfilled.
3. The order pays no referral reward.

Each of these prevents paying out the same money twice.

Refunding an order that is already being clawed back would mean giving the amount back yourself while the bank also takes it. Shipping goods for a payment that is being reversed sends inventory out against a sale that may not survive. Paying a referral reward rewards a sale that may be about to disappear.

The freeze lifts when the dispute closes. Until it does, the order is genuinely blocked — this is not a warning banner you can work around.

When a dispute is lost

A lost dispute is written into the payment ledger and raises the order's refunded amount.

That is the correct accounting outcome: money has left the order, and the order's records say so. It also means the amount you lost to the chargeback counts against the ceiling on further refunds, so you cannot lose a dispute and then refund the same value again.

The deadline and the task

Every open dispute raises one task, grouped under Approvals, and that task escalates as the evidence deadline nears.

The escalation exists because chargeback deadlines are hard. A dispute you do not answer is a dispute you lose, and the deadline does not move because you were busy.

The queue can also be sorted by the evidence deadline, which is the right way to work it when several are open at once.

Working a dispute

Do these in the admin:

• Read the order behind the dispute
• Assign it to whoever will handle it
• Watch the deadline through its task

Do this at your provider:

• File the evidence

The order page links out to the provider dashboard for exactly that step.

The thing to remember when a chargeback lands:

Everything you see here is a copy of a case being decided somewhere else, and the only clock that matters is the evidence deadline.

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