Disputes: Card Chargebacks

Understanding how payment disputes work is essential for the health of your business.

This guide will help you understand the different types of disputes, how to manage them on Cartpanda, and what actions to take to protect your sales.

What is a Payment Dispute?

A dispute — also known as a chargeback — is the cancellation of an online purchase requested by the cardholder or payment account owner.

This usually happens when the customer doesn’t recognize the transaction on their statement or is dissatisfied with the purchase.

Cartpanda, as a payment intermediary, acts as a bridge between you (the merchant), your customer, and the financial institutions (banks and card networks).

Our role is to facilitate the process, forwarding the necessary information and providing tools for you to submit your defense.

Credit Card Chargeback

A chargeback is the most common type of dispute, initiated by the cardholder through their issuing bank.

🔁 How the cycle works:

Notification

• The customer disputes the charge with their bank.
• The bank notifies the card network (Visa, Mastercard, etc.), which then informs us through the payment partner.

Funds hold

• Once the notification is received, the transaction amount is held from your Cartpanda balance.
• This acts as a guarantee since the amount has already been withheld from Cartpanda by the acquirer.

Defense period

• You have 7 calendar days to submit documentation and evidence proving the legitimacy of the sale.

Review

• The evidence is sent to the issuing bank for analysis.
• The process can take up to 120 days for a final decision.

Final decision

🟢 Dispute Won: the held amount is released back to your balance.

🔴 Dispute Lost: the amount is permanently retained and the case is closed.

How to Locate and Track Your Disputes

Cartpanda provides tools for you to manage all your disputes in one place.

Track through the Finance menu

Go to Finance → Overview to view:

• Total chargeback volume
• Open and closed disputes
• Filters by date or payment method

Finding specific orders

1. Go to your Orders page
2. Open the Filters menu
3. Click Cartpanda Pay
4. Select the Chargeback status

Chargebacks on Cartpanda vs. International Platforms

If you’ve used international platforms before, you may notice a difference.

Many platforms receive early “alerts” about potential chargebacks and, to protect their reputation, automatically refund the order before the dispute is formalized — counting it as a “refund.”

At Cartpanda, we adopt a fully transparent approach: if the refund originated from a customer dispute, we categorize it as a chargeback.

This allows you to accurately understand both your refund rate (from support requests) and your real dispute rate.

For a complete picture, we recommend adding up “refunds + chargebacks.”

Updated on: 10/08/2025