Frequently asked questions

Argumentum watches your store’s orders, fulfillments, returns, and refunds as they happen, and keeps the evidence a chargeback response needs organized before a dispute ever arrives. When one does, it assembles what it already knows into a structured draft evidence packet, flags anything missing, and lets you review, edit, and export it as a PDF.

The short version: it turns “spend an hour digging through order pages and email threads under deadline pressure” into “review a draft that’s already waiting for you.”

Because you can’t know in advance which order will be disputed. Some of the most useful evidence — tracking, delivery confirmation, the order details as they stood at purchase time — only exists if it’s captured while the order is happening. Once a dispute lands, Shopify generally gives you just 7–21 days to respond, which isn’t much time to start gathering records from scratch.

So the subscription isn’t paying for access that only turns on when something goes wrong. It’s paying for every order, every month, to be captured and organized as it happens — so that if a dispute does arrive, you’re reviewing a draft instead of starting from zero.

Most tools in this category compete on how much they can do without you. Argumentum is built on the opposite premise: you should be able to see every fact being submitted on your behalf, and change it, every time.

In practice that means three concrete differences. Every packet is reviewed by you before it goes anywhere. Every claim in it is traceable to the order data it came from, not generated by a scoring model you can’t inspect. And pricing is a flat monthly fee, not a percentage of the money you recover.

Any merchant who accepts online card payments, including stores that receive very few chargebacks today. Disputes are a normal part of that business, and industry-wide dispute volume has been rising — Visa reports it processed 106 million disputes globally in 2025, 35% more than in 2019. That doesn’t mean any individual store is guaranteed to see the same trend, but it does mean you can’t know in advance which of your orders might later be challenged.

Argumentum is for merchants who’d rather have the available evidence captured and organized before that happens, so a structured draft is ready to review if a dispute does arrive.

It’s also a good fit if you specifically want to stay in control of what gets submitted: regulated categories, high-value goods, or anything where a generic auto-generated response could misstate something about your business.

No. The issuing bank decides every dispute, and neither Shopify, Stripe, nor any app has a say in the outcome or an appeal once it’s made. We don’t promise a win rate, and you should be skeptical of anything that does.

What the evidence itself contains does appear to matter. Stripe analyzed evidence packets from one million disputes and found that, for physical-goods “product not received” disputes, packets that included delivery confirmation were associated with a 27-percentage-point higher win rate than packets without it. That’s an observed association in Stripe’s own data for one dispute category, not a guarantee, and it isn’t a claim about Argumentum’s own win rate. What Argumentum can do is make sure you actually respond, on time, with the evidence that dispute reason calls for — instead of missing the deadline or submitting whatever you could find in ten minutes. That’s the part that’s within your control, and it’s the part this app is built around.

Industry-wide dispute volume has been. Visa says it processed 106 million disputes globally in 2025, 35% more than in 2019 — that’s actual processed volume, not a forecast. Mastercard separately forecasts global chargeback volume growing another 37% between 2025 and 2029, to roughly 359 million a year.

Both figures describe the payments industry globally, not any individual Shopify merchant’s experience — they don’t mean every store’s own dispute rate is climbing at the same pace. What they do show is that disputes are becoming a bigger operational fact of digital commerce generally, which is the backdrop this app is built for.

No. Argumentum installs from the Shopify App Store like any other app and starts capturing order data immediately — there’s nothing to configure before it’s useful.

The only optional setup step is connecting a Stripe account, if you take payments through your own Stripe account alongside or instead of Shopify Payments. That’s a sign-in flow on Stripe’s side, not a configuration task.

Argumentum requests read-only access, and cannot change anything in your store. It cannot issue a refund, edit or cancel an order, alter a product, change your theme, or move money.

Specifically, we request read access to orders, fulfillments, customers, returns, and Shopify Payments disputes. That’s the complete list, and it’s the minimum needed to assemble dispute evidence.

Yes, up to a point. On install, Argumentum imports your last 60 days of orders automatically, so you’re not starting from an empty slate.

Because chargebacks often arrive two to four months after the original order, this means a dispute filed shortly after you install may reference an order Argumentum never saw. That gap closes on its own as your post-install order history builds up.

Partly, and the app is explicit about which part. Order, fulfillment, return, and refund capture works for every order in your store, no matter which gateway processed it — so the underlying evidence is being collected either way.

What depends on the provider is dispute detection: Argumentum is notified of disputes automatically for Shopify Payments, and for a Stripe account you connect. For any other gateway, we can’t see that a chargeback was filed, and the app says so plainly on those orders rather than showing a misleading “ready” badge. See Payment providers & coverage below.

Yes — Argumentum installs per store, and each store is billed and managed independently. Data is fully isolated between stores; nothing from one store is visible in another, even when you own both.

Yes. Argumentum runs embedded in the Shopify admin, so it works in the Shopify mobile app the same way it does on desktop — useful for checking a deadline or logging a customer conversation while you’re away from a computer.

As each order comes in and moves through fulfillment, Argumentum records the things a chargeback response typically asks for:

• Order details, line items, totals, and the product-image reference supplied by Shopify at capture time
• Customer name, email, and the billing and shipping addresses as they were at order time
• Shipping tracking numbers, carrier, and delivery confirmation where the carrier reports it
• Payment signals — card brand and last four digits, AVS and CVV results, digital wallet type, and authorization identifiers
• The customer’s IP address at purchase
• Refund records and Shopify return activity

Addresses and order details are snapshotted as they were when the order was placed, not as they look today — a dispute is argued on what was true at the time.

One current limitation: Argumentum records a line item’s Shopify product-image URL and notes its availability in the evidence draft, but does not yet preserve the image file itself or embed that image in the exported PDF.

A gap is a specific piece of evidence Argumentum expected to capture automatically from Shopify and doesn’t have: no shipping tracking, no billing address on file, or no purchase IP address. The badge on each order and dispute tells you how many are open.

A missing communication-log entry isn’t counted as a gap — that’s a category of evidence only you can add, not something Argumentum could have captured on its own, so it’s shown as a helpful suggestion rather than a readiness warning.

The point of showing gaps before a dispute exists is that most of them can only be closed early. Once a chargeback lands, you can’t retroactively create a tracking number that was never captured.

Yes. For a “product not received” dispute, delivery confirmation and tracking can be particularly important evidence; for a “credit not processed” dispute, refund and return records matter most; for a fraud dispute, authorization signals like AVS, CVV, and 3-D Secure carry more weight. No single item decides a case on its own, but Argumentum orders and emphasizes the packet accordingly, and writes a narrative that leads with the evidence that reason code typically calls for.

Each order also carries a per-reason readiness indicator — so you can see, before anything happens, that an order is, for example, well-documented against “product not received” but thin against “fraudulent.”

It’s a place to record what you and the customer actually said to each other — a support email, a phone call, a message about a delayed shipment — against the order or the dispute.

It matters because it’s the one category of evidence that only you have. Shopify knows your tracking numbers; it doesn’t know that the customer emailed on the 14th with a question about the package that just arrived. You can log an entry with the date it actually happened, and it flows into the evidence packet automatically.

Yes, on the Standard and Pro plans. Attach a delivery photo, a screenshot of a support conversation, a signed receipt — anything supporting — directly to an order, and it’s appended automatically to that order’s exported evidence packet.

Accepted formats are JPEG, PNG, PDF, and HEIC/HEIF (iPhone photos, which are converted to JPEG for you). Images are automatically rotated, compressed, and stripped of embedded location metadata on upload.

One caveat specific to PDFs: card networks require dispute evidence in the PDF/A archival format, and a PDF only qualifies if the fonts it uses are stored inside the file itself. Most PDFs are fine. If yours isn’t, Argumentum tells you at upload rather than quietly leaving it out of your packet later — re-save it as PDF/A, print it to PDF from an app that embeds fonts, or just upload a screenshot instead.

Yes. Individual attachments are capped at 2 MB and the set attached to one order at 4 MB combined, with a limit on the number per order. Large images are automatically compressed to fit rather than rejected.

Argumentum uses Shopify’s limits because they are stricter than Stripe’s 5 MB limit for a dispute-evidence file. Shopify accepts PDF, JPEG, and PNG evidence, caps each file at 2 MB and all evidence files together at 4 MB, and requires each PDF to contain fewer than 50 pages.

The app enforces the 2 MB-per-file and 4 MB-combined attachment limits. It does not currently enforce Shopify’s fewer-than-50-pages rule on the finished exported packet, so check the exported PDF before submitting it to Shopify.

Either way, attach a few decisive pieces of evidence rather than everything you have. Banks reviewing disputes work through high volumes quickly, and a focused response reads better than an exhaustive one.

This happens when a dispute arrives for an order placed before you installed, or when a payment provider’s record doesn’t carry anything that identifies the Shopify order directly.

Argumentum shows the dispute as unmatched and offers a Find matching order screen that suggests likely candidates based on amount, currency, card last four, and date. You confirm the right one; the packet then regenerates with the real order data. We never link a suggested match on our own.

Yes! That’s the whole point. On the review screen you can rewrite the narrative in your own words and include or exclude any individual evidence item. Excluded items are still listed by name at the bottom of the exported PDF rather than silently dropped, so the record stays honest about what was left out.

Every edit is recorded in an audit trail, including which staff member made it.

For Shopify Payments: no. Argumentum prepares the packet; you review it, export the PDF, and attach it to Shopify’s own chargeback response form in your admin. Nothing leaves the app on its own.

For a connected Stripe account: only if you ask it to, every single time. You can submit reviewed evidence straight to Stripe from the review screen — but it’s an explicit action with a confirmation step, never automatic, never scheduled, and never done on your behalf while you’re not looking.

Open the dispute in your Shopify admin (Orders → the disputed order, or the Chargebacks and inquiries view), then attach the PDF Argumentum exported to the evidence section of Shopify’s response form along with any other details you want to add.

Argumentum deliberately doesn’t do this step for you on Shopify Payments — the response form is where you get one final look at what’s being sent, and we think that look is worth keeping.

Shopify says typically 7 to 21 days from when the dispute is filed, depending on the card network. The exact due date shows on the dispute in your Shopify admin, and Argumentum shows a countdown on its disputes dashboard, escalating in urgency as the deadline approaches.

The deadline is absolute. Evidence submitted after it closes isn’t considered.

Yes, by email:

• When a new dispute is detected, so you know before you happen to log in
• When a dispute’s evidence deadline is approaching, including if it has already passed

You can turn alerts off in the app’s settings, or unsubscribe from any alert email directly. The in-app dashboard also surfaces what needs attention whenever you open it.

No, and this isn’t an Argumentum limitation — it’s how disputes work. Once evidence is submitted to Shopify or Stripe, it’s forwarded to the issuing bank and cannot be amended, added to, or resubmitted. Stripe states this explicitly: you have one opportunity to respond.

That’s exactly why Argumentum puts a mandatory review step in front of submission, and why the Stripe submission button requires an acknowledgment before it will do anything.

Longer than most people expect. For Shopify Payments, the issuing bank’s review can take up to about 75 days after you submit; inquiries typically run 65–75 days. Stripe cites up to three months. Argumentum updates the dispute’s status automatically when the outcome arrives.

There is no appeal. The issuing bank’s decision is final, and neither Shopify nor Stripe can reverse it.

An inquiry (sometimes called a retrieval request or pre-dispute) is the bank asking a question before a formal dispute exists — no funds are pulled and no dispute fee applies yet. A chargeback is the formal version: the money is debited from you immediately and a fee applies.

Responding well to an inquiry can stop it from escalating, which saves you both the fee and the hit to your dispute rate. For supported, monitored payment providers, Argumentum records both inquiries and chargebacks and builds an evidence packet for either one.

Shopify Payments — fully supported, no setup. Disputes are detected automatically, including payments taken through Shop Pay, which settles through Shopify Payments.

Stripe — supported for a Stripe account you connect. Sign in through Stripe to connect it; disputes are then detected automatically, and you can optionally enable direct evidence submission as a separate, deliberate second step.

PayPal — the integration itself is fully built and in testing. It’s gated behind PayPal’s own partner-approval process, which is outside our control and has no set timeline.

Argumentum tells you, clearly and repeatedly, rather than pretending otherwise. Those orders show a Not monitored badge instead of a readiness badge, the orders list shows a banner summarizing which providers aren’t covered, and the home dashboard raises it as an item needing attention.

This is deliberate. Their order data is still captured — you’d just need to watch that provider’s own dashboard for disputes.

You connect by signing in to Stripe through Stripe’s own authorization flow — the same “Connect with Stripe” pattern you’ve seen elsewhere. We never ask you to generate, paste, or store a Stripe secret key, and we don’t hold one.

The initial connection is read-only. If you later want Argumentum to submit evidence to Stripe directly, that requires a separate authorization step that you take explicitly — so read-only stays read-only unless you decide otherwise.

No. Argumentum is a response tool, not a prevention tool. It helps you answer disputes that have already been filed — it does not screen orders for fraud, block risky checkouts, or stop a customer from calling their bank.

No. Those services let you refund a customer before a dispute is formally filed, which avoids the fee and keeps it off your dispute rate. They require direct partnerships with the card networks that we don’t have, and they typically bill per alert.

They solve a genuinely different problem than Argumentum does — deflecting disputes before they exist, versus responding well to the ones that do. Plenty of merchants use both. We mention this openly because it’s the first thing most comparison shopping turns up, and we’d rather answer it than have you find out later.

No, and this surprises almost everyone. Your chargeback ratio counts disputes that were filed, not disputes you lost. Winning a chargeback gets your money back; it does not remove the chargeback from the ratio your payment processor and the card networks monitor.

This matters because that ratio — not your win rate — is what can trigger a reserve, an account review, or losing access to features. It’s an argument for keeping dispute volume down in the first place, alongside responding well to the ones you get.

Only orders that exist in your Shopify store, paid through a provider we monitor. Disputes raised directly on Amazon, eBay, or a non-Shopify storefront run through those platforms’ own processes and aren’t visible to us.

Three plans, all billed through Shopify:

• Free — $0/month, up to 30 orders per month.
• Standard — $9/month, 300 orders included, then $0.05 per additional order.
• Pro — $29/month, 3,000 orders included, then $0.01 per additional order.

Every plan includes the full evidence capture, readiness dashboard, alerts, and review features. Attachments are the one feature limited to Standard and Pro. Full details on the pricing section of the overview page.

No. You pay a flat monthly fee based on your order volume, and nothing else. We don’t take a percentage of recovered chargebacks, we don’t charge per dispute, and we don’t charge more when you win.

This is a deliberate difference from how much of this category prices. A percentage-of-recovery model means your bill is unpredictable and largest in your worst months.

Every new install gets 14 days of full access — every feature, no gating, regardless of which plan you eventually choose. No credit card is required to install.

Any order placed in your store during a rolling 30-day window — not just disputed orders, and not a calendar month. Argumentum captures evidence for every order, since you don’t know in advance which will be disputed, so order volume is what the plans are sized against.

Nothing sudden. If your volume stays above the limit for several consecutive days, we email you a recommendation and start a 14-day grace period during which everything keeps working normally. Only if that period lapses without an upgrade does Argumentum stop generating new evidence packets.

Even then, every packet you’ve already generated stays fully reviewable, exportable, and downloadable. Billing state never takes away evidence you already have.

Nothing stops working. Standard and Pro have no hard limit — additional orders are simply billed at that plan’s per-order rate. If your volume grows to where Pro would be cheaper than Standard plus overage, we’ll email and tell you so; if it shrinks, we’ll suggest moving down.

Through Shopify, from the Billing page inside the app. Because billing runs entirely through Shopify’s own subscription system, cancelling the app removes the charge the same way it does for any other Shopify app — there’s no separate account to close and nothing to email us about.

Order and dispute records are stored in a managed PostgreSQL database; exported evidence PDFs and uploaded attachments live in private cloud object storage. Neither is publicly reachable — downloads work through short-lived links generated fresh each time you click, never a permanent public URL.

Each store’s data is isolated from every other store’s at the query level, and your Shopify access credentials are encrypted at rest. Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Not indefinitely. Once a dispute is closed and more than 75 days have passed since its evidence deadline, we automatically purge the personal information tied to that order — customer email and phone, billing and shipping addresses, purchase IP, communication-log notes, uploaded attachments, and the packet’s narrative text. Non-personal business records (amount, status, outcome) are kept for recordkeeping.

If an order has more than one dispute, we wait until all of them have closed and aged out, so an open dispute’s evidence is never affected.

For an order that never receives a dispute, the current version retains its captured order data while Argumentum remains installed. Uninstalling triggers deletion of the store account and its associated data. We are reviewing a separate age-based limit for undisputed orders; card networks commonly allow a dispute within 120 days of payment and allow longer windows in some circumstances.

Shopify notifies us when you uninstall, and we erase the store’s account and associated data and delete our copy of your access credentials.

PDFs you already downloaded are unaffected — they’re on your own systems, and yours to keep.

Yes. Card networks require dispute evidence in PDF/A, an archival PDF format designed so a document still renders identically years later on systems that don’t have your fonts installed — which matters because bank review systems are often old, and evidence is sometimes still handled by fax. Every packet Argumentum exports is PDF/A-2b conformant, verified against veraPDF, the industry reference validator.

This is the kind of requirement that’s easy to miss and expensive to discover late, so it’s handled for you rather than left as something to check.

Yes. An exported evidence packet is a plain PDF file. Once you’ve downloaded it, it’s yours, independent of your Argumentum subscription, plan, or whether the app is still installed.

Yes to both. We honor Shopify’s mandatory privacy webhooks — a customer data request, a customer erasure request, or a full shop erasure request each trigger the corresponding action in our systems automatically.

Our Data Processing Addendum applies automatically on install and incorporates the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum. If you need a countersigned copy, email admin@tenpennysoftware.com with your store name and Shopify store domain.

Argumentum records an internal audit trail for actions such as editing a narrative, including or excluding an evidence item, adding a note, changing a setting, and submitting evidence. Where Shopify provides the staff identity, the record includes the staff account that took the action.

The dashboard currently shows only a limited recent-activity feed for packet generation, packet export, and notes. There is not yet a merchant-facing screen where you can search or review the complete audit trail.

Only where the feature requires it, and never invisibly. Alert emails go through our email provider. Purchase-IP location lookups (used for the billing-address mismatch signal) go to a geolocation service, and you can turn that off entirely in settings.

If — and only if — you use the optional direct-submission feature, the reviewed evidence you approve is transmitted to Stripe, on the specific occasion you confirm it. Everything is itemized in the Privacy Policy.

Usually one of three things. The order was paid through a provider we don’t monitor — check the coverage banner on your orders page. Or a connected Stripe account’s notifications aren’t reaching us, in which case the Settings page shows a warning and a daily reconciliation check will pick the dispute up within 24 hours regardless. Or the dispute is genuinely new and hasn’t been reported to us yet.

The Settings page shows when we last received an event and last ran a reconciliation check for each connected account, so you can tell the difference between “quiet” and “broken.”

Yes. On the order’s detail page there’s a Refresh tracking from Shopify action that re-queries Shopify for the current tracking and delivery information. This helps when tracking was added or corrected after the fulfillment was first created.

If Shopify genuinely doesn’t have a tracking number, Argumentum won’t let you type one in. That’s intentional — the app should never be able to hand you a fact you can’t back up when you submit it to a bank.

An exported packet is frozen along with a fingerprint of the exact PDF produced, so what you downloaded and what our records say you downloaded can never disagree. That matters if a submission is ever questioned later.

You’re not stuck, though: adding a note or updated tracking to the dispute generates a new version of the packet, which you can edit and export freshly. The old version stays on record as the historical one.

English and Spanish (Latin America), selectable in Settings. More languages are planned. Evidence packet PDFs and alert emails are currently generated in English regardless of interface language.

Email hello@tenpennysoftware.com. Include your store domain and, if it’s about a specific dispute, the order number — it saves a round trip.

Tenpenny Software is a small, independent developer, which means you’re emailing the people who build the app rather than a support tier. However, that also means our response times may be longer than those of a dedicated support team.