Building a Streamlined Dispute Evidence Interface for Stripe

You know what’s worse than getting a chargeback? Trying to fight it with incomplete information. After implementing device fingerprinting for CE 3.0 compliance, we realized we still had a problem: our team was spending too much time manually gathering evidence to fight disputes.

The process was tedious and error-prone. Someone would get a notification about a new dispute, then had to manually dig through multiple systems to find the right transaction details, customer information, and other evidence. Then they’d have to format it all correctly and submit it through Stripe’s dashboard. It was taking 15-20 minutes per dispute, and with growing transaction volume, this was quickly becoming unsustainable.

So we set out to build an internal tool that would streamline this process. The goal was simple: create an interface that would automatically pull in all the necessary data from our billing system and Stripe, format it according to Stripe’s requirements (including the new CE 3.0 evidence fields), and allow our team to submit it with just a few clicks.

We decided to keep things simple and built the solution with PHP for the backend and vanilla JavaScript for the frontend. No fancy frameworks or libraries, just clean, maintainable code that gets the job done. This approach had the added benefit of making the tool easier to maintain and extend by other developers on the team.

The first technical challenge was pulling data from multiple sources. We needed transaction details from our billing system, customer information from our user database, and dispute details from Stripe. We wrote a series of PHP classes to handle these API requests efficiently, with proper error handling and caching to minimize latency.

A particularly interesting part of the project was dealing with the new Visa CE 3.0 evidence requirements. The system needed to automatically identify qualifying previous transactions from the same card and customer, then extract the required matching elements like device fingerprints and IP addresses. This involved some complex query logic, but the payoff was huge in terms of dispute win rates.

The frontend was designed to be straightforward and efficient. When a team member opened a dispute case, the system would pre-populate all available evidence fields. This allowed our team to quickly spot gaps and decide whether additional information was needed before submission.

One feature we’re particularly proud of is the evidence preview system. Before submitting, users could see exactly how the evidence would appear to the dispute reviewer, allowing them to make adjustments if something didn’t look right. This significantly reduced errors and improved our win rate.

The most satisfying part of the project was the immediate impact. What used to take 15-20 minutes per dispute now took less than 2 minutes. Our team could process more disputes, with better evidence, in a fraction of the time. And because the tool automatically included all the CE 3.0 evidence when available, our dispute win rate improved dramatically for fraud claims.

The whole project took about three weeks from concept to deployment, but it’s been saving us countless hours every month since then. And as an unexpected bonus, having all this dispute data in one place gave us better insights into patterns of legitimate versus fraudulent disputes, which has helped us refine our fraud prevention measures.

If you’re dealing with a significant volume of Stripe disputes, we strongly recommend implementing a similar tool. The Stripe API is well-documented and relatively easy to work with, and the time savings alone will justify the development effort. Plus, with the new CE 3.0 requirements, having an automated system that consistently includes all the necessary evidence elements will significantly improve your chances of winning disputes.

The key lessons from this project were straightforward: automate repetitive tasks, put all relevant information in one place, and make it dead simple for users to do the right thing. These principles apply to almost any internal tool development, but they’re especially valuable when dealing with processes that directly impact your bottom line, like dispute management.