How are chargeback fees handled?

A lost Shopify Payments dispute comes off your P&L as a return, on the day Shopify closed it. nouz reads disputes once your store has given it permission, which Shopify asks for on its approval screen. A dispute, also called a chargeback, is when a customer asks their bank to take a payment back.

A dispute counts once you lose it, or once you accept it without answering. The disputed money counts as a return, VAT included, because it went back to the customer. A dispute you win, or one still open, changes nothing. If a dispute ends with a refund instead, the refund counts like any other, and the dispute adds nothing on top. nouz reads Shopify Payments disputes only. A dispute through another provider, like PayPal, reaches your P&L only when a refund is recorded in Shopify.

To check the permission, open Settings, then Integrations, and click the Shopify row. Under What nouz can read, look for Lost Shopify Payments disputes, and for Dispute fees from your Shopify Payments account. If the disputes line is missing and your store was connected before nouz asked for it, open nouz from your Shopify admin, under Apps, as an owner or admin. Shopify then shows its approval screen once. Until the permission is in, a dispute reaches your P&L only when Shopify records it as a refund on the order.

The dispute fee is on your statement too, with your other payment fees, as a transaction cost. nouz reads each fee from your Shopify Payments account, exactly as Shopify charged it, on the day it was charged. If you win a dispute and Shopify gives the fee back, it counts back on that day. On the P&L, open Transaction Costs to see Dispute fees on a row of their own. On the Transaction fees page, the Shopify Payments row adds them to its fees and lists your lost disputes with their fees. nouz reads the fees once your store has given it access to its Shopify Payments account, which Shopify asks for on its approval screen. A store connected before nouz read dispute fees does not have that access, so its dispute fees are not on the statement: Transaction Costs leave them out, and EBITDA reads higher by each fee. Shopify lists each dispute with its fee in your Shopify admin.

A dispute never adds return processing. No parcel comes back, so a return label and handling would invent work that never happened. The Returns page says the same. A refund for a dispute carries return costs only if its items are marked as returned to stock. Like any refund, it lands on the day it was recorded. The payment fee on the first sale is not paid back, since payment providers keep it.

To see what a dispute costs in full, try the chargeback cost calculator. It adds up the money without its VAT, the dispute fee and your time. Act early if disputes start to rise, because payment providers raise prices on such accounts, and sometimes close them.