Chargeback Representment: What to Put in the Packet

Three JPEGs. That is what eBay's payment dispute form accepted from me the first time I tried to answer one, after I had spent an hour building a fourteen-page representment packet with the listing, the message thread, the label receipt, and every tracking event in order.

The form wanted images. Five files maximum, JPEG or JPG or PNG, everything under 1.75 MB combined, and a box for supporting text (Handling payment disputes, eBay, read 2026-08-18). eBay publishes the file limits on that page. It does not publish a length for the text box, so assume the box is shorter than what you want to say.

So the real question is not "what evidence do I have." It is "what survives the trip through a very small door, and gets read by someone who has ninety seconds for it."

The door is smaller than your evidence

Every route to the issuer has a hard shape, and the shape is not the same on any two of them. Check yours before you build anything.

The Stripe numbers and the one-shot rule come from Respond to disputes, Stripe Docs (read 2026-08-18), which also states the part that makes preparation non-optional: "You've only one opportunity to submit your response... You can't edit the response or submit additional files."

The Amazon row is the one I cannot stand behind. That help page lives inside Seller Central and would not open to me on 2026-08-18, so the seven days is secondhand until you read it in your own account under the title "Chargeback claims." Whichever number turns out to apply, run it through the chargeback response deadline calculator and work backwards from the due date; who runs each of these clocks, and why the platform's is shorter than the network's, is a longer story than this post wants to tell.

Stripe's guidance also rules out three things sellers keep sending. Banks will not review audio or video files, will not follow links to tracking pages, and will not act on a request to call you for more information. Your unboxing video is worthless here. A still frame from it is not.

One more constraint that changes how you assemble files: Stripe allows only one file per evidence type, so several photos of one returned item have to be merged into a single multi-page file before you upload. Do that merge in advance, not at 11pm on day five.

What "proof of delivery" means in writing

Here is the sentence that reframed this whole thing for me.

Visa's rules for a dispute response under condition 13.1 (Merchandise/Services Not Received) require the acquirer to show that the cardholder received the merchandise, and for delivered goods that means "proof of delivery that contains the full delivery address (tracking with partial address is not permitted)" — Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules, 18 April 2026 edition, section 11.10.2.6, Table 11-94 (read 2026-08-18).

Read the parenthesis again. A carrier page that says Delivered — Columbus, OH 43215 is a partial address. It is the thing most of us screenshot, because it is the thing the carrier shows by default. It does not, on its face, satisfy the requirement.

What does: the carrier's detailed delivery record showing the complete street address the parcel was left at, with date and time. On USPS that is the delivery record you pull for the tracking number, not the public summary page. On UPS and FedEx it is the proof-of-delivery document the site will generate and email to you. Pull it at the time you ship, because four months later the detail may be gone from the carrier's site while the dispute is still very much alive.

For a not-as-described claim the required contents are different again. Visa's dispute response requirements for condition 13.3 ask for evidence proving the merchandise "matched what was described (including the description of the quality of the merchandise or service) or was not damaged or defective" and a "merchant rebuttal to the Cardholder's claims," plus, if it applies, evidence the cardholder never attempted a return or certification that a returned item was never received (Table 11-108, same edition).

That "and" is doing real work. Your written rebuttal is a named, required element, not a courtesy note. Photographs alone do not complete the response.

The fraud code is a different animal, and mostly not yours to fight

If the notice carries Visa condition 10.4 — card-absent fraud, the "I never made this purchase" claim — the admissible evidence list changes completely, and most of it is data you do not hold.

Visa's Table 11-6 lists what an acquirer may submit as compelling evidence. Item 3 covers delivered card-absent goods: evidence the item was delivered to the same physical address for which the merchant received an AVS match of Y or M, and the rule adds that "a signature is not required as evidence of delivery." Item 10 accepts evidence that three or more of customer account/login ID, delivery address, device ID/fingerprint, email address, IP address, or telephone number were used in an undisputed transaction.

Look at those fields. AVS results, IP addresses, device fingerprints — a marketplace seller never sees any of them. The platform does. So on a 10.4 you are not the one assembling the strongest part of the case. You supply the delivery half and hope the platform's systems supply the rest.

The framework behind item 10 is Compelling Evidence 3.0, and its qualifying criteria are spelled out in Compelling Evidence 3.0 Merchant Readiness, Visa (March 2023): two previous transactions at least 120 and no more than 365 days old measured from the dispute date, with no active fraud report and no active fraud dispute, at least two matching core data elements of which one must be the IP address or device ID, and both from the same merchant. That document also warns that merchants and acquirers "will only be able to attempt submission of CE3.0 criteria once," and that incorrect or incomplete attempts are declined.

This is moving. The summary of changes at the front of the 18 April 2026 rules carries an entry headed "Updates to Compelling Evidence 3.0 for Dispute Condition 10.4: Other Fraud – Card-Absent Environment," effective 24 October 2026. Visa says it is expanding the availability and application of the remedy, and that the framework will support multi-merchant transactions as qualifying evidence. If you are reading this after that date, the criteria above are the old ones. Open the current edition.

Order it the way an investigator reads it

Nobody at the issuing bank is going to reconstruct your story from a pile of attachments. Build the packet so the first thing opened answers the claim.

Start with one page of plain text that names the reason code from the notice, states what the buyer claims, states what happened, and points at each exhibit by name. Short sentences. No adjectives about the buyer. If the form gives you one text box, that page is the text box: write it in a text editor first and paste it in whole.

Then the delivery record with the full street address. Then the listing as it appeared at the time of sale, showing the description and photos the buyer actually saw. Then the message thread, cropped to the exchange that matters, with dates visible. Then, if there was a partial refund, the record of it — a credit already issued by the merchant is one of the specific things a dispute response can be built on under Visa's 13.1 and 13.3 tables, and issuers do miss it.

Label the files so the names carry meaning: 01-delivery-record-full-address.jpg, not IMG_4417.jpg.

Keep the rebuttal factual to the point of being boring. You are writing for a stranger in a claims queue who has your file and the cardholder's file and no particular reason to prefer either one.

The size cap is a budget you spend deliberately, not a wall you hit at the end. Five files under 1.75 MB in total is about 350 KB apiece on eBay's form, which is smaller than one full-resolution phone screenshot, so the reading order above doubles as a spending order: the full-address delivery record and the listing snapshot keep their pixels, and the message thread gets cropped to the two or three lines that carry dates. Stripe's one-file-per-evidence-type rule pushes the same way, and its Mastercard cases are capped at 19 pages combined — merge first, then check the total, because a merge done at the upload screen is where the label receipt quietly gets dropped.

The screenshot that cost me a case I should have had

My habit used to be a single capture of the tracking page the moment it flipped to Delivered. City, state, ZIP, timestamp. It looked complete. I had used it a dozen times in platform cases, where it works fine, because the marketplace already knows the shipping address it handed me and is only checking the scan against it.

An issuer knows none of that. It has a cardholder saying the parcel never came, and a screenshot with no street on it. Nothing in that image ties the delivery to the address on the order.

The fix took an afternoon. Now the shipping routine ends with pulling the carrier's full delivery-detail document once the scan lands, and dropping it in a folder named for the order ID, next to the packing photo and the label receipt. About twenty seconds per order, and it is the only version of this document that matches what the rulebook asks for.

Same lesson as the one in chargebacks versus platform disputes: the marketplace and the bank are two different audiences, and evidence that satisfies one can be inadmissible to the other.

The law sitting underneath the network rules

Card network rules are private agreements between banks. Underneath them, for US consumer credit cards, sits Regulation Z's billing error procedure at 12 CFR 1026.13 (current text read 2026-08-18).

Three parts of it explain behaviour that otherwise looks arbitrary.

A "billing error" expressly includes a charge for property "not delivered to the consumer or the consumer's designee as agreed" — §1026.13(a)(3). The item-not-received claim is written into federal regulation, not merely into Visa's rulebook.

The consumer's notice has to reach the creditor "no later than 60 days after the creditor transmitted the first periodic statement that reflects the alleged billing error" — §1026.13(b)(1). Sixty days from the statement, which itself lands well after the purchase. Part of why a card claim can surface months after an order you consider finished.

And the creditor must conduct "a reasonable investigation," then resolve within two complete billing cycles and in no event later than 90 days — §1026.13(c)(2) and (f). Your packet is the entire merchant-side input to that reasonable investigation. That is the whole job it has to do.

None of this gives you a right to appeal to a regulator over a lost case. It tells you what the person on the other end is obliged to do, and on what clock.

Run the drill on an order nobody is disputing

Pick one order you shipped this week and assemble the packet for it as if a dispute had already arrived: full-address delivery record, listing snapshot, message thread, label receipt, merged and sized to fit under 1.75 MB. Time yourself. That number is how long you will need on the day, and it is always longer than people expect.

Then take your last ten shipped orders and ask something narrower than "is the tracking still up." Can you still pull a document that shows the full street address? Summary pages outlive delivery detail by months, and it is the detail the rulebook asks for. Whatever share of the ten fails that test is your exposure, and it is a percentage rather than a worry.

What comes back from that test depends less on the carrier than on which service was bought at the counter. USPS's Domestic Mail Manual says plain USPS Tracking gives "information about the date and time an article was delivered" and that "no record is kept at the office of mailing" (DMM 503.7.1.1), while the records that name an address sit in the extra services: a proof-of-delivery letter supplied by email (503.1.8), or a return receipt, which the manual describes as providing "information about the recipient's actual delivery address" (503.6.1.1). Adult Signature is the one with a printed shelf life — "the USPS maintains a record of delivery (including the recipient's signature) for two years" (503.8.1.1). Score your ten orders that way rather than as a single percentage, because the orders that fail are usually the ones where nothing address-bearing was ever generated.

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Everything above was read on 2026-08-18, in these documents: the Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules, 18 April 2026 edition (sections 11.2.3, 11.5.1, 11.10.2.6 and 11.10.4.6; Tables 11-2, 11-6, 11-94 and 11-108); Visa's "Compelling Evidence 3.0 Merchant Readiness," March 2023; eBay's "Handling payment disputes"; Stripe's "Respond to disputes"; the USPS Domestic Mail Manual 503 (sections 1.8, 6.1.1, 7.1.1 and 8.1.1); and 12 CFR 1026.13.

Three things I could not open, and did not pretend to: Mastercard's Chargeback Guide, whose file host refused every request; Amazon's "Chargeback claims" page, which needs a Seller Central login; and Etsy's payments policy pages. Every figure that came from one of those is flagged where it appears, and reading it in your own account is part of the job.

The CE3.0 criteria have an expiry printed on them — Visa's own summary of changes puts an expansion into effect on 24 October 2026 — so this page gets opened again that month. Platform submission limits change with no announcement at all, which is why the table above prints what the form did rather than what a policy says.

I read rulebooks and I file claims. I am not a lawyer and I do not sell representment services, and no page can tell you in advance how one claims desk will read your file.