Disputes

A dispute is a chargeback that a customer raised through their bank. Use this page to keep track of each one and make sure somebody answers it before the deadline.

Your payment provider sends each chargeback to the admin by webhook.

A chargeback doesn't start with you. The customer goes to their bank, the bank goes to your provider, and the provider then tells you it has happened.

The admin therefore shows a copy of the dispute. The dispute itself is handled at your provider, and that explains almost everything about how this page behaves.

Each dispute arrives linked to the order it was charged against. It shows the dispute's status, its amount and its evidence deadline.

You'll find the queue at:

Orders → Disputes

Linked to the order

Each dispute belongs to an order.

From the dispute, the items, the totals and the customer (when the order has one) are one click away. The queue also links straight to the order page.

This matters because a chargeback is an argument about one specific purchase. Your defence comes from the order: what the customer bought, what it cost, what you shipped, and when.

The provider controls the dispute

Your provider's webhooks create, update and close chargebacks.

You can't raise a chargeback in the admin, and you can't edit its status.

The only field you can change is the assignee.

This is intentional. The provider keeps the official record of a dispute, and the bank decides the outcome. If you could edit the status here, it would only be a second opinion. It could disagree with the provider, and your own reports might believe it.

Clear ownership

Assign each dispute to someone on your team. Each person can then filter the queue to show only their own disputes.

Chargebacks are usually lost when they have a deadline and nobody owns them. The admin lets you change the assignee because it is the one thing your provider can't know.

What an open dispute blocks

While a chargeback is open, Litestore holds the order in place and blocks three things:

1. You can't refund the order.
2. You can't fulfill the order.
3. The order doesn't pay a referral reward.

Each block stops you from paying out the same money twice.

If you refunded an order that the bank is already taking back, you would return the amount yourself while the bank takes it too. If you shipped goods for a payment that is being reversed, you would send out stock for a sale that may not stand. If you paid a referral reward, you would reward a sale that may be about to disappear.

The block lifts when the dispute closes. Until then, the order really is blocked. It isn't a warning banner that you can work around.

When you lose a dispute

When you lose a dispute, Litestore writes it into the payment ledger and increases the order's refunded amount.

That is the correct accounting result. Money has left the order, and the order's records say so. The amount you lost also counts against the limit on further refunds, so you can't lose a dispute and then refund the same amount again.

The deadline and its task

Litestore raises one task for each open dispute and groups it under Approvals. The task escalates as the evidence deadline gets closer.

The escalation exists because chargeback deadlines are strict. If you don't answer a dispute, you lose it, and the deadline doesn't move because you were busy.

You can also sort the queue by evidence deadline. That is the best way to work through it when several disputes are open at once.

Working a dispute

In the admin, you do these things:

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

At your provider, you file the evidence. The order page links to the provider's dashboard for that step.

When a chargeback arrives, remember this:

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

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