It never arrived: how to answer an item-not-received chargeback

The email arrives from Stripe rather than from the buyer, which is the first unpleasant part. A payment you counted three weeks ago has been disputed as item not received, the money is already held back, and you have a deadline measured in days. Your instinct is to write something indignant about how carefully you packed it. Resist that. A dispute is a documents exercise, and the person reading your reply has never met either of you.

What is actually being decided

A chargeback is not a conversation with your buyer. It is a claim made to their card issuer, assessed by people who see only what is filed. The question in front of them is narrow: is there evidence that the goods were sent to the address the cardholder gave. Your relationship, your reputation and the care you took with the tissue paper are not part of the record unless you convert them into documents.

The genuinely hard part with physical goods is that the strongest available evidence is delivery evidence, and if you posted by an untracked service you do not have any. That is a real disadvantage and there is no way to write around it. What you can do is build a coherent, dated, boring account of a legitimate transaction and a genuine posting, which is considerably better than an emotional paragraph and nothing attached.

It is also worth saying that not every dispute is dishonest. Parcels do go missing. Buyers do forget. Households do sign for things and put them in a cupboard. Approaching the first message as fraud costs you the chance to resolve it before it ever reaches the card network, which is by far the cheapest outcome available to you.

A reply from memory against a reply from records

Two sellers can face the same dispute and file entirely different responses. The difference was decided weeks earlier, at a post office counter and in a folder. store.fan supplies the transaction side of that folder automatically, and the customer list keeps the buyer's history in one place so you can see whether this is a first order or a fifth.

Assembling the response

Work in this order. It takes about half an hour if your filing is decent and most of a morning if it is not, which is its own argument for the counter habit.

1. 1Open the order in Dashboard, Orders and print or screenshot the full record: date, product, price, delivery fee and the address as submitted.
2. 2Find the postage receipt for that order and check the date sits sensibly after the payment date.
3. 3Pull your dispatch message to the buyer, with its date and its wording, from wherever you sent it.
4. 4Check the customer's history. A repeat buyer with earlier successful orders is a relevant fact, so include it.
5. 5Write a timeline of six to ten lines. Dates, actions, nothing else. No adjectives.
6. 6State plainly whether the service was tracked. If it was, attach the tracking history. If it was not, say so rather than implying otherwise.
7. 7Note that the delivery fee and total were shown before payment, which addresses any suggestion the buyer did not know what they were paying for.
8. 8File it in Stripe before the deadline, attachments in date order, and keep a copy for yourself.

A worked example, with illustrative figures

Take a GBP 48 order with a GBP 5 delivery fee, posted untracked with a stamped receipt. The response you can file is a clean timeline: paid on the 3rd, packed and posted on the 5th, receipt from a named branch, dispatch message sent the same afternoon, address matching the one submitted at checkout, delivery fee shown before payment. That is a credible account of a real sale, and it is still not delivery evidence.

Now suppose you had paid GBP 1.20 more for a signed-for service. The same bundle plus a signature usually settles the matter. Across a hundred parcels that upgrade costs GBP 120, which is worth it if disputes are costing you more than that in refunds, fees and hours, and is not if they are not. Run that comparison on your own numbers once a quarter rather than reacting to the last bad week. The figures here are illustrative and prove nothing about your shop.

The mistake most people make

The mistake is arguing rather than evidencing. Long, wounded paragraphs about how much care went into the parcel read as noise to an assessor working through a queue, and they crowd out the two or three facts that might have carried it. The second mistake is silence in the days before the dispute: a buyer who messages twice, hears nothing and then rings their bank was solvable for the price of one reply. Answer delivery questions quickly, offer a resend or a refund where it is reasonable, and reserve the formal response for the cases that reach it. The FAQ covers where the platform's role ends, and there is more on physical selling across the blog.

Disputes are a cost of selling things people cannot hold before they buy. You will not avoid all of them, and you can make each one a half-hour of filing instead of a bad week, by keeping the boring paperwork on ordinary days when nothing seems to be at stake.