Chargeback and dispute handling for your Shopify store
A chargeback is a reversal the customer forces through their bank or PayPal, bypassing your store. Backbone Customer Service builds the response, gathers the evidence and submits it for Shopify stores, on Shopify Payments, PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, Whop, Ocean Payments and other payment providers, as a standard part of the customer service we run.
What a dispute costs your store
When you lose a chargeback you lose the order amount, usually the product as well, and you pay a chargeback fee on top. On Shopify Payments that fee is 15 euro per dispute in EU countries. If you win the dispute, both the amount and the fee come back. A high dispute rate also puts your payment account at risk.
Winning a dispute is mostly legwork against a tight deadline. You have to see why the customer opened it, gather the right evidence, submit it in the right order and be on time. In a growing store that is usually the work that gets left behind, because the inbox and the shipments come first.
How a chargeback and a PayPal claim run
Shopify Payments
The customer's bank opens the dispute and Shopify flags it in your admin. You usually have 7 to 21 days to submit evidence, depending on the card network. The bank then reviews the file, which can take up to 75 days. If you win, the amount and the fee are returned. If you lose, you lose both.
PayPal
A buyer can open a dispute up to 180 days after payment. Buyer and seller then have 20 days to work it out. If they do not, and the buyer does not escalate either, PayPal closes the dispute. If the buyer does escalate to a claim, you generally have 10 days to respond and PayPal usually decides within 30 days.
Stripe, Klarna, Whop, Ocean Payments and other providers
Every payment provider has its own deadlines and its own portal. The deadline is shown next to the dispute in the provider's dashboard. We carry it into your disputes overview, so the disputes from all your payment providers sit in one place, sorted by deadline.
The mistake we see most often with new clients: the dispute is noticed when the deadline is almost up, and half a file goes out in a hurry. We work from a shared disputes overview, pick up the most urgent cases first and only submit complete files.
The four reasons we handle most, and the evidence that counts
Shopify distinguishes eight categories, including fraudulent, unrecognized, duplicate, product not received, product unacceptable and credit not processed. In day-to-day store practice almost everything comes down to the four below. For each one we have a fixed response and a fixed evidence set.
- Product not receivedWe verify tracking down to the last mile, collect the carrier's proof of delivery and bundle tracking, delivery confirmation and the Shopify order export into one PDF. The full customer conversation from Zendesk goes with it, so the bank sees the customer was helped.
- Credit not processedThis one turns on your store's return policy. We show where that policy is visible (header, footer, checkout) and pick the scenario that applies: cancellation was no longer possible because the order had shipped, the product was returned to the wrong address, the customer filed a dispute without registering a return, or the refund was already processed and we supply the proof.
- Product unacceptableThe same delivery proof as "not received", plus the product description and images from your store. We show the product matched the listing and that the customer did not request a return, while consumer rules in the EU, UK, US and Australia expect the customer to contact the seller first.
- FraudulentWe first check whether the customer is known in Zendesk. If there was contact, the conversation history goes in as proof that the cardholder placed the order. If not, we supply the order confirmation. In both cases we show the fraud checks (CVC, AVS, postal code) passed, with Shopify's fraud analysis and the payment provider's data attached.
How disputes run at Backbone
Every open dispute from all your stores and payment providers (Shopify Payments, PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, Whop, Ocean Payments and more) sits in a shared disputes overview you can follow yourself, with the status, the last action and the dispute rate per store and per payment provider. We work through that overview by deadline rather than by order of arrival.
For each reason code we use a fixed evidence set: tracking proof, delivery confirmation, Shopify order export, the Zendesk conversations, the return policy as a PDF and the fraud analysis. For every store we keep the current return policy on file as an attachment, so the file matches what is on your site. The response goes out through Shopify, PayPal or the provider's portal, and we write the outcome back to your overview.
Because the same agents run your inbox, we often see disputes coming. A customer who asks three times about a parcel and gets no answer files a chargeback. A customer who gets an answer within eight hours usually does not. Every month we go through what is causing disputes and refunds, so you can fix the cause.
Dispute handling for all your payment providers is part of our customer service for Shopify stores. This is what else we take over.
Frequently asked questions about disputes and chargebacks
What is the difference between a dispute, a claim and a chargeback?
How much time do I have to respond to a chargeback?
Which evidence works best for "product not received"?
Can I avoid a dispute by simply refunding?
Do you handle disputes for multiple stores at once?
Is dispute handling included in the customer service?
Related pages
Curious what this looks like for your store?
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