A Stripe dispute happens when a customer's card issuer reverses a charge, usually because the cardholder claims they didn't authorize it or didn't get what they paid for, and the disputed amount gets pulled out of your balance immediately, along with a dispute fee that typically isn't refunded even if you win. You get a window to submit evidence contesting it; if you don't respond in time, you lose by default. The mechanics are Stripe's. Catching every dispute in time, with the right evidence attached automatically, is usually where businesses start needing something more than checking the dashboard by hand.
1. The card issuer reverses the charge. This can happen weeks or even months after the original payment, triggered by the cardholder disputing it with their bank, not with you directly.
2. Stripe deducts the disputed amount and a dispute fee from your balance, and fires a `charge.dispute.created` event you can catch via webhook if you're watching for it.
3. You get a deadline to respond, set per case and shown in your dashboard, typically somewhere between about one and three weeks depending on the card network involved. Miss it and you lose automatically, no matter how strong your evidence would have been.
4. You submit evidence through the dashboard or the Disputes API: proof of delivery, the customer's communication history, your refund or cancellation policy, whatever actually rebuts the specific reason code on the dispute.
5. The card network rules on it, which can take weeks to months. If you win, the funds return. If you lose, the deduction and the fee both stand.
The deadline doesn't move for you, and the evidence that actually wins a case, order confirmation, shipping proof, the exact email thread where the customer agreed to the charge, usually lives in two or three different systems that have nothing to do with Stripe. Someone has to go find all of it, format it the way the card network expects, and get it submitted before the clock runs out, for every single dispute, not just the big ones.
At low volume that's an annoying afternoon now and then. Past a certain number of disputes a month, it turns into a real workload, and it's also where a climbing dispute rate quietly starts putting your account standing at risk, since card networks and Stripe both watch that ratio and can restrict an account that runs too high for too long.
The webhook that fires when a dispute opens triggers a pull of the matching order, shipping confirmation, and support ticket from wherever your business actually keeps them, formatted and ready for whoever submits the response, instead of someone starting that search from zero against the clock.
Your dispute rate tracked over time and compared against the thresholds that actually matter, with an alert before it becomes a problem a card network notices first, rather than someone spotting it by eyeballing a dashboard once a month.
Tell us your current volume and where the evidence-gathering actually slows you down, and we'll look at what's worth automating before the next deadline, not after.
Tell us how many Stripe disputes you're handling in a typical month and what slows the response down, and we'll show you where automation actually saves time versus where it wouldn't. Disputes are just this page's example; any deadline-driven, evidence-gathering process in your business is fair game for the same fix.
Let's talk →A refund is something you initiate voluntarily, returning the customer's money on your own terms. A dispute is initiated by the customer's card issuer, pulls the funds out of your balance immediately whether you agree or not, and comes with a fee and a deadline to contest it. Refunding proactively before a dispute opens, when you know a charge is a problem, avoids the fee and the process entirely.
Stripe charges a flat dispute fee per case, deducted when the dispute opens, and it's generally not refunded even if you win the dispute. Check Stripe's current pricing page for the exact figure in your country, since it varies and changes from time to time.
It varies by case and by card network, but it's typically somewhere around one to three weeks. Stripe shows the exact deadline for each dispute in your dashboard; there's no universal fixed number to rely on instead of checking the actual case.
Card networks generally start paying closer attention once a merchant's dispute rate climbs toward roughly 1% of transactions, and sustained rates above that can lead to monitoring programs or account restrictions. Staying well under that, and watching the trend rather than just the current month, is the safer target.
Yes. The Disputes API lets you submit evidence programmatically, which is what makes it possible to automate pulling the right order and shipping data together and filing it the moment a dispute opens, rather than someone doing that lookup by hand in the dashboard.