Disputes about an order

Most sales go smoothly. When one doesn’t, the buyer needs somewhere to turn, and you need the facts to decide fairly. With disputes, a buyer who paid through your site can report a problem with their order. You read their conversation with the seller and decide: refund the buyer, pay the seller, or close it.

Disputes are part of the Professional and Marketplace plans, for every sale paid on your site: Buy Now, accepted offers and quotes, and the shopping cart (Marketplace plan). There’s nothing to switch on. They work with the Nova and default themes.

Hold the money until delivery

A dispute is most useful when the seller hasn’t been paid yet. On the Marketplace plan, switch on Pay sellers after delivery on the Commission on sales page (the Stripe escrow setting): the money then waits until the buyer confirms they received the item, and while a dispute is open it stays on hold, even if the order would otherwise be marked as received automatically.

With it on, buyers also see a buyer protection note at checkout in the shopping cart: each seller is paid only once you confirm you received your order. If something is wrong, report a problem from My Payments before confirming.

Without it, the seller is paid at the moment of the sale. You can still read the dispute and help both sides, but any refund is made in your Stripe or PayPal account.

How a buyer reports a problem

In My Payments, the buyer clicks Report a problem next to the order. (From their conversation with the seller, Open a dispute does the same; in Nova it’s in the conversation’s ⋯ menu.)
They choose What went wrong?: I didn’t receive it, It isn’t as described, It arrived damaged or Something else.
They describe it under Tell us what happened (10 to 2,000 characters) and click Send the dispute.

Report a problem shows on a paid sale that the buyer hasn’t marked as received, and that isn’t cancelled or refunded. One dispute can be open per order; the order then shows Dispute open.

What happens next:

the buyer’s message is posted in their conversation with the seller, so the seller can answer there;
the seller and your site’s administrators get an email, with a button that opens the disputes;
the conversation appears in Reported conversations in your admin panel.

If the buyer sorts it out with the seller and clicks Mark as received after all, their dispute closes in the seller’s favour, and the seller is paid.

Decide a dispute

Click Reported conversations in the sidebar. Disputes about an order show Dispute with the order number.
Click Open. You see the order (amount, buyer, seller, whether it was shipped or received), what the buyer says, and the whole conversation between them.
Write your decision in the box. It is emailed to the buyer and the seller.
Click one of the buttons and confirm.

Button	What happens
Refund the buyer	The order is cancelled, what the seller was due is taken back, and the buyer is refunded to their card.
Pay the seller	The order is marked as received and the seller is paid.
Close without a payment change	No money moves: they sorted it out, or you settled it elsewhere.

Refund the buyer and Pay the seller only show for a card payment through Stripe that is still on hold (payments held until delivery, not yet received or cancelled). For anything else, the page tells you why, and you settle it in that payment account (Stripe, PayPal, Escrow.com…) and then close the dispute.

If Stripe refuses a refund, nothing is said to the buyer or seller and the dispute opens again, so you can check the order in Orders and try again.

Resolve in the list of reported conversations also closes a dispute without a payment change, and tells both sides. Every decision is recorded in the audit log.

Bank chargebacks

Sometimes a buyer asks their bank to reverse a card payment instead. When Stripe tells your site about it (set up the webhooks on the Commission on sales page), the chargeback opens a dispute on the order, or joins the one the buyer already opened. The dispute page then shows The buyer also disputed the payment with their bank with an Open in Stripe link.

Answer the bank in your Stripe Dashboard before its deadline. When the bank decides, the dispute closes by itself, as won by the seller or by the buyer, and both are emailed.

Good to know

Disputes and returns work together: a buyer whose return the seller refused can take it to you, and it arrives as a dispute.
The dispute emails are written by Yclas and aren’t in Email templates.
Themes with their own My Payments page (such as Atlantic Lite and the themes based on it) don’t show Report a problem. Members can still use Open a dispute in the conversation on Nova and the default theme.
Paid bookings keep their own chargeback handling and don’t open a dispute here.

Returns on sales — when the buyer wants to send an item back.
Support tools for administrators — reported conversations and the audit log.
Stripe and Stripe Connect — card payments, commission and holding the money.
Orders and transactions — refunds and cancellations by hand.