A dispute, also called a chargeback, starts when a buyer challenges a card payment with their card issuer. Stripe then gives you a deadline to respond with evidence. memberarea shows the disputes of your connected Stripe account and lets you send that evidence without leaving the admin area.
Before you start
If Payments is off in your workspace, switch it on under Settings > Features first. Viewing disputes needs View Payments, and saving or submitting evidence needs Update Orders / Customers. Of the built-in roles, Owner and Admin have both.
Where disputes appear
Open Payments > Sales > Refunds and choose Disputes in the Type switch. memberarea reads the list live from your Stripe account, so it always matches what Stripe has. With a live and a test account connected, the list shows the live account. Each row shows the Amount, the Reason, the Status and the date to Respond by. Load more fetches older disputes.
The three-dot menu holds Only disputes awaiting response and, when live and test are both connected, Show test disputes.
When a dispute is waiting for your response, the payments overview also shows Open disputes in the Needs attention box, with the earliest deadline. It looks at the 25 most recent disputes of your live account, or of the test account while no live account is connected.
The statuses come from Stripe. The ones that need you are Needs response and Warning: needs response. Others include Under review, and a closed dispute ends as Won, Lost or Charge refunded.
Responding with evidence
Click a dispute to open it. While you can still respond, the top shows the Time left to respond. It also shows the Respond by date, the number of Submissions, whether there is Evidence on file and whether the dispute is Past due. Below that comes the evidence form, split into groups such as Product & customer, Customer communication, Service & access, Shipping and Policies & rebuttal.
Fill in only what fits the reason of the dispute. For digital products such as a course or membership, Service & access is meant for proof that the buyer received or used what they paid for, with the Access activity log as a text field. Documents such as a Receipt or Service documentation are uploaded with Upload document as PDF, PNG or JPEG, up to 5 MB each.
- Click Save draft as often as you like. The draft is stored in Stripe.
- When the evidence is complete, click Submit evidence and confirm Submit evidence to Stripe?.
Submitting is final. Stripe forwards the evidence to the card network, and you cannot change or add to it afterwards.
You can only respond while the status is Needs response or Warning: needs response. Once the deadline has passed, Stripe may no longer accept evidence. For every other status, the form shows the evidence read-only.
memberarea has no button to accept a dispute. Do that in your Stripe dashboard. See Stripe's guide to responding to disputes for how the process runs on their side.
What a lost dispute changes
This section applies to Stripe. Stripe tells memberarea about every change to a dispute. While a dispute is open or once you have won it, nothing changes on your side apart from the recorded status.
When a dispute is lost, or settled by refunding the buyer, the money is gone. memberarea then marks the payment as disputed and reverses the affiliate commissions on it in full. For a one-off purchase, the order is marked as refunded and the buyer loses the access this order granted. Access you granted by hand stays, and so does what another paid order still gives them. Stock goes back, event tickets from the order free their seats, a gift card used on the order gets the applied amount back and a gift card bought with it is voided, unless part of it was already used. A disputed subscription payment leaves the subscription and its access in place.
A lost dispute does not create a credit note, because no refund was issued.
PayPal disputes
Disputes on PayPal payments do not appear in this list. If PayPal is connected, the disputes view shows PayPal cases are handled at PayPal with a link to Open the Resolution Center, where you respond to the case and upload evidence. A refund you issue there reaches memberarea like any other refund. A case that PayPal decides against you, and a reversal of a PayPal payment, work like a lost Stripe dispute: the payment is marked as disputed. If the full amount of a one-off purchase is lost, the order is marked as refunded and its access is removed.