The Dispute Defense Hub

Merchant Processing: What Are Fast Approval Options?

January 9, 2026 By FightDisputes

When you’re first setting up a business, you’re probably going about it slowly and deliberately. You take your time registering your business and developing your assets, you set up and extensively test your website, you make sure your storefront works. One area that often stalls out new business owners is figuring out which merchant payment […]

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Customer Chargeback After a Partial Refund – Now What?

January 6, 2026 By FightDisputes

Under normal circumstances, chargebacks aren’t too complex. A purchase has a value, the customer disputes the charge, and that value is clawed back from your accounts and returned to the customer. You pay penalties and fees as a merchant. The common method to fight chargebacks is to offer a refund instead. Ideally, the customer accepts; […]

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What Happens if You Never Reply to a Credit Card Dispute?

December 21, 2025 By James Parsons

The credit card dispute and chargeback process is a great idea in theory. It’s part of consume protections: if a charge is made that the customer doesn’t believe is valid, they can dispute the validity, have it investigated, and get their money back if it’s not a valid transaction. Unfortunately, the way the process stands […]

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What to Do When Stripe Closes Your Credit Card Processing

December 19, 2025 By James Parsons

As a merchant, you’re extremely reliant on your payment processor to continue doing business. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of reasons why that payment processor might decide to cancel your account. Illegal activity is a big one, obviously, but even ending up with too many chargebacks and a high chargeback ratio can put your account […]

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Do Chargeback Alerts Work with Shopify Stores?

December 17, 2025 By James Parsons

Chargebacks are devastating for a merchant, especially when they’re too frequent. They’re also incredibly frustrating, because a lot of the time, the process is already well on its way by the time you’ve found out a customer even filed a dispute. How can you try to fight back or be proactive with chargebacks when you’re […]

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Can You Refund a Customer After a Chargeback Starts?

December 14, 2025 By James Parsons

Every merchant knows that chargebacks can be devastating. You lose the money from a sale, you pay extra fees, you often lose whatever product was shipped out, and if your chargeback rate gets too high, there are even worse penalties. At the heart of every chargeback is a customer who wants their money back. We […]

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How Your Credit Card Descriptor Affects Chargebacks

December 11, 2025 By James Parsons

If you aren’t sure what your descriptor is, or if you’ve decided you need to change it, how do you do so? The specific instructions will vary, so I can’t provide every permutation here. The simple version is, you need to go to the settings of your payment processor or payment gateway account. Generally, there […]

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Can Shopify Cancel Your Account for Excessive Chargebacks?

November 20, 2025 By James Parsons

Usually, when we’re discussing chargebacks, it’s a topic that centers around the merchant, the credit card companies, and the banks that have to handle the details of a payment. Chargebacks cost money to administrate, and that fee is passed on to the merchant. It’s no wonder that banks and payment processors are more than willing […]

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What is Network Tokenization for Recurring Charges?

November 10, 2025 By James Parsons

It’s been a long time since the invention of payment options other than handing over cash in exchange for goods and services, and that means there has been a ton of development and evolution in the systems underpinning those payment options. When virtually everyone uses some form of digital payment system, and with tens of […]

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Soft vs Hard Credit Card Descriptors: What’s The Difference?

November 9, 2025 By James Parsons

When a customer makes a purchase, their transaction goes through several steps in the process of being validated, approved, and finalized. Ideally, that process is very fast, so the customer isn’t stuck standing in line waiting for approval and hoping a computer system didn’t crash, or waiting on a website wondering if they need to […]

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What is a Rolling Reserve in Payment Processing?

November 6, 2025 By James Parsons

A simple business transaction takes place between you and a customer. When you’re selling items with cash, they hand you cash, you hand them the item, and both parties walk away happy. When you’re accepting means of payment other than cash, you need a payment processor to handle it. Your payment processor validates the transaction, […]

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What Is a Return Item Chargeback and How Does It Work?

October 24, 2025 By James Parsons

Chargebacks are bad for business, but some can be worse than others. So, any time you head about a kind of chargeback you haven’t encountered before, you might start to worry. What is this kind of chargeback, and what do you need to do to keep it from putting your merchant account at risk? Of […]

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Why Are All Digital Goods Businesses “High Risk”?

October 12, 2025 By James Parsons

I’ve talked before about the perils of being considered a high-risk merchant, including the steep fees, risk of cancellation, and restrictions on business opportunities that can affect you.  For many businesses, though, there’s nothing you can do about it.  In fact, certain classes of business are labeled high risk, no matter what. One of those […]

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What Are the Benefits of Integrating 3D Secure (3DS)?

October 7, 2025 By James Parsons

When the internet was first starting to become a vector for commerce rather than just information, people quickly recognized the need to be able to handle payments remotely and digitally.  It also very quickly became obvious that there would be a need for an authentication protocol to validate transactions using credit cards, to prevent fraud […]

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What is a Good Rate Percentage for a High Risk MID?

October 2, 2025 By James Parsons

One of the most important considerations for a business is how resilient you are to fraud and abuse. Good businesses fold because they’re abused due to lax security all the time. While you have many tools available to you to fight fraud and abuse, you still need to use them properly. If you don’t, you’ll […]

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