Manage Disputes
Last updated: Sept 24th, 3:56pm
Occasionally, something goes wrong with a customer's order. Customers can dispute charges by filing a case with PayPal, their bank, or their credit card company to reverse charges, or chargeback.
When a customer disputes a charge, you can counter with evidence to show the charge is legitimate. You can provide:
- Proof of delivery
- Refund Documents
- Notes
- Logs
Note: PayPal does not support disputes and chargebacks for transactions placed using Alternative Payment Methods. Instead, buyers are directed to their third party bank or wallet to handle the disputes.
Dispute solutions
With the PayPal Commerce Platform, you choose how involved or informed you'd like to be in the dispute process.
| Involvement | Path |
| Let sellers manage their own disputes | Connected |
| You can actively manage disputes | Managed |
Important: If you manage disputes for your sellers, you must respond to disputes in a timely manner. It is your responsibility to respond to the case with relevant information.
No matter which path you choose to handle disputes, you can
- Enable notifications
- Generate case reports
- Use the PayPal Disputes API for disputes webhooks and to pull updates to existing disputes
Enable notifications
Enable dispute notifications, add the Disputes permission text to the permissions that your seller agrees to during onboarding.
Generate reports
PayPal provides reports to help you manage day-to-day operations and provide transaction-level insight.
With PayPal reports, you get transaction-level insight that helps you manage day-to-day operations. Reports are updated daily so that you can reconcile and manage revenue, review activity details, and manage dispute cases and chargebacks.
To set up report access and parameters, contact your account manager or Merchant Technical Support. You can also explore the available reports. Refer to the report specifications for information about format, file record limits, and file structure.
In the future, these reports may be available in multiple versions. To take advantage of new versions, you can receive two versions of the same report concurrently (or non-consecutive versions of the same report) for testing and integration purposes. Contact your account manager for information on new or deprecated versions of the report, to enable access to different versions, and to request any changes in report distribution.
Reports are generated every 24 hours and available by 12 pm daily in the leading time zone of the reporting window.
For more information, see PayPal Reports.
Use the PayPal Disputes API
Important: You must have a PayPal access token to use the Disputes API.
When a customer disputes a charge, you can use the Disputes API to:
- List disputes
- Show dispute details
- Accept a claim
- Settle dispute
- Appeal dispute
- Escalate a dispute to a claim
- Make an offer to resolve a dispute
- Provide evidence
- Update dispute status
- Send message to other party
Third-Party Integrations
If you use the Disputes API on behalf of your sellers, provide a JSON Web Token (JWT) in the PayPal-Auth-Assertion header. The JWT represents a set of claims as a JSON object encoded in a JSON Web Signature (JWS) and/or JSON Web Encryption (JWE) structure.
For more on the PayPal-Auth-Assertion HTTP header, see HTTP Request Headers.