How to Win a Stripe Chargeback

When a cardholder contacts their bank to dispute a charge, Stripe receives the chargeback notification and immediately debits the disputed amount from your account, along with a $15 dispute fee. This happens before you even know about it. The entire process follows a strict timeline that most merchants underestimate.

From the moment a dispute is created on Stripe, you typically have 7 to 21 days to respond with evidence. The exact window depends on the card network: Visa gives you 20 days from the dispute date, Mastercard gives 18 days, and American Express gives just 20 days. Miss that window, and the dispute is automatically resolved in the cardholder's favor. There are no extensions and no appeals for late responses.

After you submit evidence, the card network reviews it. This review takes 60 to 75 days on average. During that time, the funds remain held. If you win, the disputed amount plus the $15 fee is returned. If you lose, the money is gone permanently. For most dispute types, there is only one chance to respond. There is no back-and-forth negotiation.

The industry average dispute win rate is roughly 12%. That means 88% of disputes end with the merchant losing money. This is not because the disputes are legitimate. Studies suggest that up to 80% of chargebacks are "friendly fraud" — cases where the customer received the product or service but disputes the charge anyway. Merchants lose because they fail at the evidence stage, not because they were in the wrong.

There are three main reasons merchants lose winnable disputes. First, they submit no evidence at all. Nearly 40% of Stripe disputes receive no response. Some merchants don't know they have a dispute until the deadline passes. Others see the notification but don't understand what to submit. Second, merchants submit weak or poorly formatted evidence. A bank analyst reviewing your case spends roughly 90 seconds on it. If your evidence is disorganized, difficult to read, or missing key data points, they will rule against you. Third, merchants submit evidence that fails to address the specific reason code. A fraud dispute requires different evidence than a product quality dispute. Submitting generic information signals to the reviewer that you don't understand the claim.

Stripe's dispute evidence structure is organized into four categories. Understanding which fields to populate for each dispute type is the single biggest factor in your win rate. Stripe accepts up to 28 evidence fields, but you do not need to fill all of them. What matters is submitting the right fields for the specific dispute reason.

Each Stripe dispute comes with a reason code that tells you exactly what the cardholder is claiming. Your evidence must directly counter that specific claim. Here is the essential evidence checklist for the five most common dispute reasons.

3D Secure (3DS) is the single most powerful tool for winning fraud chargebacks. When a customer completes 3D Secure authentication during checkout, the liability for fraud shifts from the merchant to the card-issuing bank. In practice, this means that fraud disputes on 3DS-authenticated transactions are almost always resolved in the merchant's favor.

Here is why this matters: fraud is the most common dispute reason, accounting for roughly 60% of all chargebacks on Stripe. If a customer claims "I didn't authorize this purchase" but the transaction record shows they completed 3D Secure authentication (entered a one-time code sent to their phone or verified via their banking app), the card network recognizes that the bank's own authentication system confirmed the cardholder's identity. The burden of proof shifts to the issuing bank.

Stripe's Radar tool allows you to configure 3D Secure rules. You can require 3DS for all transactions, for transactions above a certain amount, for specific risk levels, or for specific countries. Most merchants should start by requiring 3DS for transactions over $50 and for elevated risk scores. The slight increase in checkout friction is far outweighed by the near-automatic win on fraud disputes.

A transaction authenticated with 3DS includes an electronic_commerce_indicator (ECI) value in the payment record. When you submit this as evidence along with the 3DS authentication result, bank analysts see immediately that their own verification process was completed. Win rates on 3DS-authenticated fraud disputes exceed 90%.

Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 (CE 3.0) is a program that allows merchants to present historical transaction data to prove that a disputed charge was made by the legitimate cardholder. Introduced in April 2023, CE 3.0 has fundamentally changed how fraud disputes are evaluated for Visa transactions.

Under CE 3.0, if you can show that the cardholder has made two or more previous undisputed transactions from the same device or IP address within the past 365 days, Visa treats the current dispute as likely legitimate. The key matching criteria are IP address and device fingerprint. If the disputed transaction shares an IP address or device ID with previous successful purchases, you have compelling evidence that the same person made all the transactions.

This is why device fingerprinting and IP collection are so important. Without these data points, you cannot take advantage of CE 3.0 even if the same customer has purchased from you dozens of times. The data must be collected at the time of each transaction and stored in a way that can be retrieved during a dispute.

When CE 3.0 evidence is submitted correctly, Visa pre-arbitration outcomes heavily favor the merchant. The win rate for qualifying CE 3.0 disputes is significantly higher than standard fraud dispute responses. This is one of the most impactful changes to chargeback defense in the past decade.

Manual dispute responses are slow, inconsistent, and error-prone. A merchant handling disputes manually spends 30 to 45 minutes per dispute gathering evidence, formatting a response, and submitting it through the Stripe Dashboard. Multiply that by 20 disputes a month, and you are spending 10 to 15 hours on chargeback defense. That is time not spent growing your business.

Automated dispute defense tools detect disputes the moment they are created (via webhooks), gather evidence from your transaction history in seconds, generate tailored responses using AI, and submit everything to Stripe within minutes. The speed advantage alone is significant: disputes responded to within 24 hours have measurably higher win rates than those submitted days later.

Beyond speed, automated tools ensure consistency. Every dispute gets a complete evidence package with all relevant fields populated. No evidence is forgotten because an employee was busy. No deadline is missed because someone was on vacation. The response quality is uniform across all disputes.

AI-powered narrative generation takes automation further. Instead of submitting raw data points, AI can craft a coherent defense narrative that presents your evidence as a persuasive story. The narrative addresses the specific dispute reason, highlights contradictions in the cardholder's claim, and references relevant card network regulations. This is the difference between handing a bank analyst a pile of receipts versus presenting a structured legal brief.