E-commerce and payments
What is Chargeback?
A chargeback is a customer disputing a payment with their bank, which reverses the funds and usually adds a fee. Winning one requires evidence, so the systems that record what was ordered, delivered and communicated matter more than the dispute process itself.
Also called: payment dispute · card dispute
The common causes, in order
- The customer did not recognise the descriptor on their statement
- The goods did not arrive, or arrived late
- The item was not as described
- Genuine card fraud
- A subscription the customer forgot they had
What prevents most of them
- A clear statement descriptor matching your trading name
- An order confirmation email that actually arrives
- Realistic delivery dates and proactive notice when they slip
- An easy route to contact you — a hard-to-reach merchant gets disputed instead of emailed
- Clear renewal reminders on subscriptions, before the charge
What to keep for evidence
Order records, delivery confirmation, the exact terms shown at checkout, and the correspondence. A store that cannot produce these loses disputes it should win, which is a systems problem rather than a payments one.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Why checkouts get abandoned, and which fixes belong in the build covers this properly — 2 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.