What are disputes and chargebacks?

A dispute is an umbrella term for customers contacting their payment provider to request a transaction is reversed and receive their money back.

Online sellers will be notified by a payment processor when this occurs.

These notifications can be used to proactively communicate with customers, issue refunds, send disputes to risk tools, or to automatically defend disputes.

Sometimes chargeback and dispute can be used interchangeably - at Primer we use the more generic term of ‘dispute’ as ‘chargeback’ is usually associated with card payments only. Don’t worry if you’re looking for information on chargebacks - you’re in the right place!

A dispute in Primer has:

  • a dispute type and status that conforms to a unified dispute lifecycle
  • information about the original payment submitted to Primer, such as payment method, order ID, and payment ID

The following currencies are not supported for dispute management:

BHD, BIF, CLP, CVE, GNF, HUF, IDR, INR, ISK, KHR, KMF, MMK, PYG, RWF, SAR, UGX, VED, VES, VND, XOF, XPF

If a dispute is received in one of these currencies no webhook will be triggered.

Access your dispute information

Our DISPUTE.STATUS webhook will notify you when a dispute event has been received from the processor.

The webhook can be set up inside the Primer dashboard. If you want to know more about webhooks, check out our Webhook guide. For these webhooks to be sent from Primer, you also first have to set up dispute notifications to be sent to Primer from within the processor dashboard.

Primer Disputes app

The Primer Disputes app allows our unified disputes to be used in Primer Workflows.

When a new dispute is received from a processor, the dispute app can automate sharing the unified dispute format with other apps.

For example, this can be used to send dispute events to fraud tools like Riskified, who often require this information to improve risk models, or indemnify chargebacks.