Somewhere tonight, a person is standing on their front step looking at an empty doormat. They have the shipping email open. It says Delivered, 2:14 PM, front door. Their stomach drops in that particular way it does when something that belonged to you has been taken by someone you'll never see. They feel foolish and violated, and they're angry with no one to aim it at. Then they remember that their bank has a button for this. A few days later the dispute lands in your Stripe dashboard. What makes it so hard to read is that the customer isn't lying. They really didn't get the package. You did everything right too, and the money is leaving your account anyway.
This is the stolen-package chargeback. Merchants tend to lose it to guilt, not to the evidence. Once a real, sympathetic person has been robbed, fighting back can feel petty. This article is about getting past that feeling. Contesting the dispute isn't an accusation against the customer. It's a question about where your responsibility ended.
Delivered and received are two different events
The idea at the center of this whole dispute is the gap between delivered and received.
You control delivery. You choose a carrier, pay for the service, and send the item to the address the customer typed in. Once the carrier's scan says the parcel reached that address, your part of the transaction is generally complete. Receipt happens on the customer's side of the door, and theft from that porch is a crime against them. You didn't fail to perform.
The card networks' rules for "merchandise not received" disputes broadly follow the same logic. Stripe files these under the product not received reason. The issuer mainly wants to know whether you delivered the goods to the address the cardholder gave you. It doesn't ask whether the cardholder ended up holding the item. You still aren't guaranteed a win, because issuers weigh evidence differently and some will side with their cardholder on a close call. But the case is often winnable, and much more so than most merchants assume.
Where merchants go wrong is in arguing the wrong question. They write long, apologetic responses about how much they care, how carefully they pack, and how they'd love to help. None of that addresses the question the reviewer is actually holding: did this go to the right address, and can you prove it?
Why the customer went to the bank and not to you
The pull toward conceding comes from somewhere, so it's worth understanding the customer's side.
Loss aversion, the finding from Kahneman and Tversky's work on prospect theory, describes how losses feel heavier than equivalent gains. Something you already owned, and were looking forward to, hurts more to lose than its price suggests. Theft adds a sense of violation on top. Someone came onto your property. People in that state go looking for relief, and the chargeback button is the quickest relief on offer. It doesn't require a police report or a carrier claim form, and they never have to talk to anyone.
The customer often isn't making a moral judgment about you at all. They take the path of least resistance away from a bad feeling, and the bank happens to sit at the end of it.
Knowing this makes the next step feel less fraught. When you contest the dispute, you aren't calling the customer a liar. You can hold both truths at once: they lost something real, and you aren't the party who should absorb it. Merchants who make that distinction clearly in their own minds tend to write calmer, more factual responses. Calm, factual responses tend to be the ones that read well to a reviewer working through a stack of cases.
What actually proves delivery
Tracking evidence isn't all equally strong. Reviewers are looking at how much confidence a document gives them, so it helps to think in layers.
The basic layer is a carrier tracking record showing a delivered status to the shipping address on the order. It's necessary, but on its own it can look thin, especially for higher-value orders.
The stronger layer is anything that puts a specific location or person on the delivery. Many carriers now attach a delivery photo, and some record GPS coordinates at the moment of the scan. If the photo shows the parcel at a recognizable door, include it. A signature is stronger still, which is why it's worth requiring one above a price threshold you set.
The connecting layer gets skipped most often, and it's the one that ties the delivery to the cardholder. Show that the shipping address matches the billing address, or that it matches addresses this customer has used on earlier orders that weren't disputed. Include AVS and CVV match results from the original payment. Add the order confirmation email that listed the shipping address the customer entered. Together these say that the address the parcel went to is one this cardholder chose and has a history with.
The behavioral layer covers what the customer did and didn't do. Did they contact you before disputing? Did they file a claim with the carrier? If you offered to help open a carrier investigation and they never replied, that silence belongs in your timeline, stated neutrally and with no editorializing.
One caution: if the shipping and billing addresses don't match and the customer says they never ordered anything, you may not be looking at porch theft at all. It could be true fraud, filed under a different reason code with different evidence requirements. Read the reason code before you build the case.
The record that disappears
There's an uncomfortable practical detail here. Carrier tracking pages aren't permanent. Delivery photos and detailed scan histories can drop off public tracking after a period of time, and the dispute may arrive weeks after the box went missing. Merchants who wait until a dispute appears to go look for proof sometimes find that the strongest piece of it, the photo of the parcel at the door, has already expired.
That's why the strongest stolen-package cases are mostly assembled before anyone files a dispute. The work happens when the order ships.
Write the response like a timeline, not a plea
The best responses to this kind of dispute read almost like an incident log:
The order was placed on this date, from this IP region, with matching AVS. It shipped to the address the cardholder entered, which matches the billing address and two prior orders. The carrier confirmed delivery to that address on this date and time, and the delivery photo is attached. The customer did not contact us before disputing. Per the network's delivery standard, the merchandise was delivered as agreed.
It contains no adjectives and no wounded tone. You don't need to tell the reviewer you're sorry the customer was robbed, though one plain sentence acknowledging it does no harm if you want to include it. What wins is how easy the facts are to follow.
Your next moves
- Check what your carrier services actually capture. Open your last ten shipments' tracking pages today and note which ones include a delivery photo or GPS detail. If your cheapest service never does, you now know exactly where your evidence gap is.
- Set a signature threshold. Pick a dollar amount where a disputed loss would genuinely hurt. Many small merchants land somewhere between their average order value and roughly double it. Require a signature on every order above that amount from now on.
- Save proof of delivery at the moment of delivery. Add a step, manual or automated, that screenshots or stores the delivered scan and any photo against the order record within a day of delivery, before the carrier's page expires.
- Write a "my package is missing" support reply now, before you need it. Ask the customer to check with neighbors, building mailrooms, and other household members, and offer to open a carrier investigation with them. Then keep every reply, and every non-reply, with the order.
- Pull the billing-versus-shipping match on your next disputed order before writing a word of your response. If the addresses don't match, stop and confirm whether this is a theft claim or a fraud claim. They're fought differently.
Where Argeback fits
Stolen-package disputes are rarely lost on the merits. They're lost because the photo expired, the AVS result never made it into the response, or the merchant felt too awkward to answer until the seven-day window had quietly closed. Argeback is built for exactly that. It pulls in the dispute, gathers the delivery and payment evidence into a clean timeline response, and files it before the deadline, from your phone, on the evening you'd otherwise have let it go. If you're tired of paying for thefts that happened on someone else's porch, see how Argeback works.