A chargeback is not a refund. It is a dispute filed with the customer's bank — and if you do nothing, the bank rules against you by default. You lose the sale, the goods, and pay a fee on top. Most small teams lose disputes they would have won, for the simple reason that nobody owned the reply.
We just published the chargeback response template on our ops-notes site: the dispute clock, the evidence each reason code needs, and a paste-in rebuttal letter. This post is the short version.
The clock starts the day the dispute lands
Processors give a window that is often 7 to 10 days from the dispute notice (it varies — check your dashboard's deadline and calendar it the same hour). Two facts make the deadline non-negotiable:
- The fee is real either way. Winning the dispute usually does not refund the chargeback fee ($15–$100 depending on processor).
- Your ratio is watching. Disputes ÷ transactions is tracked by the card networks; Visa's monitoring threshold has historically sat at 0.9% and keeps moving lower. Cross it and you land in a monitoring program — fines, and in the worst case, a terminated merchant account.
Disputes die in shared inboxes. Assign them to one person with a standing order: check the disputes tab every business day.
Answer the reason code, not your feelings
Every dispute carries a reason code, and the code tells you which evidence wins:
- Fraud / unauthorized (Visa 10.4) — proof of delivery to the address on file, matching AVS/CVV, the customer's login IP and device, prior undisputed orders on the same card.
- Product not received (Visa 13.1) — tracking with delivery confirmation and signature, dated photos, the shipping address the customer entered.
- Not as described — the product page the customer saw, dated; the support conversation where expectations were set.
- Recurring billed after cancel — the terms accepted at signup, usage logs after the alleged cancel date. (If your cancellation requires an email and three days, you are manufacturing these. Make cancel a button.)
The evidence pack: five items, one PDF
Processors read fast. One PDF, five items or fewer, labeled in the order the reason code cares about:
- Proof of fulfillment (tracking + signature, or download/access logs for digital goods)
- Transaction proof (order ID, AVS/CVV results, IP and device)
- Customer history (prior undisputed purchases)
- The terms they accepted at checkout (refund/cancel policy, statement descriptor)
- The conversation (trimmed, chronological)
The letter: under 250 words
Decision-makers skim; the PDF carries the proof. The full template on the site is a paste-in with brackets — it opens with the reason code, numbers the evidence to match it, notes that the cardholder never contacted support before disputing, and stays polite. Adjust the numbered items to the code: a "not received" dispute leads with tracking, not AVS.
The rules that win
- Answer the reason code, not the injustice you feel.
- Facts, dates, numbers — no adjectives.
- Never pressure the customer to withdraw the dispute; let the evidence speak.
- Submit at half-time, not at the wire.
- Log every dispute — the log is your ratio dashboard and your prevention data.
Prevention beats rebuttal
A statement descriptor that says your brand name kills a huge share of "fraud" disputes that are really confusion. AVS and CVV on, receipt emails that tell customers what the charge will look like, refund-first when a customer is angry (a refund costs the sale; a chargeback costs the sale plus a non-refundable fee plus ratio damage), self-serve cancellation, and signature confirmation on anything over ~$200.
And know when to accept: small amounts, plausibly-right claims, friendly-fraud grey zones. Accept means eat the fee, block the card and email, move on. A second dispute from the same customer is not a pattern to study; it is a pattern to prevent.
The full page — with the complete paste-in letter, the reason-code table, and a worked $480 Visa 10.4 win — is here:
👉 Chargeback Response Template for Small Teams
If you run a small store, also read the payment outage playbook (chargeback triage when a processor backlog clears) and the seasonal peak readiness checklist (surge sales bring surge disputes).
HIVE80lab writes one ops note a day for small teams: incident runbooks, checklists, and templates that assume no IT department.
If you want the sheets that make this a ten-minute job instead of an afternoon: the Ops Starter Kit ($14) and the Automation Starter Pack ($19) cover the checklists on this page as fill-in worksheets. The First 30 Minutes checklist is free.
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