Disputes

Customers → Disputes is every payment a customer has challenged through their bank or wallet provider.

A dispute is not a refund. A refund is you deciding to return money. A dispute is somebody else’s institution deciding whether you keep it, on a schedule you do not control.

The lifecycle

Stage	What is happening	Your move
opened	The customer’s institution has raised it.	Read it. Decide whether to contest.
evidence_required	We need your evidence, by a deadline.	Submit, or accept the loss.
evidence_submitted	With the institution.	Wait.
won	You keep the money.	Nothing.
lost	The money is returned to the customer.	Nothing to appeal.
expired	The deadline passed with no submission.	Nothing. This is a loss you chose.
resolved	Closed by another route.	Nothing.

The deadline is the whole thing

evidence_required carries a deadline, and it is set by the customer’s institution, not by us. If it passes, you lose automatically — not on the merits, but on the silence. That is the single most common way a defensible dispute is lost.

So:

• Make sure disputes reach a human. Subscribe to the dispute.opened and dispute.evidence_required webhooks, or give someone the job of checking this page. A dispute discovered a week late is often a dispute already lost.
• Treat the deadline as earlier than it is. Submissions are reviewed by people who go home.

What evidence is worth submitting

The question an institution is answering is “did this customer authorise this, and did they get what they paid for”. Evidence that speaks to that wins; evidence that restates your terms does not.

What helps:

• Proof of delivery or collection — a signed receipt, a delivery confirmation, a timestamped handover, a log of the service being used.
• The authorisation trail — that the customer completed the payment themselves on their own handset or card.
• Your correspondence with them — especially anything where they acknowledged the purchase.
• Your refund and cancellation terms, if the customer agreed to them visibly and you can show it.

What does not help: a long explanation of why you believe you are right, your general policy with no evidence the customer saw it, or a restatement of the transaction we can already see.

Attach documents rather than describing them. Submit once, completely — a partial submission is weaker than a late complete one, and the completeness rules are the same whether you submit through the portal or the API, because the portal and our console share the same definition of a complete submission.

When accepting is the right answer

Sometimes it is. If the customer is right, or if you cannot produce evidence, the fee and the staff hour spent contesting it exceed the amount in dispute. Let it expire deliberately rather than defending everything by reflex.

What you should not do is accept a pattern of disputes without asking why they arrive. A rising dispute rate reaches us too, and it affects your risk profile and eventually your pricing. If one product or one channel generates them, that is worth fixing at the source.

Do not refund a disputed payment

The dispute process decides that money. Refunding alongside it can leave you out twice — once to the refund and once to the dispute — and it does not withdraw the dispute.

If you want to settle with the customer, say so in your evidence and let the process close.