When a customer disputes a charge

It's worth reading even if a restaurant has never seen one — a dispute shows up without warning, on a deadline that starts the moment the payment provider reports it, and knowing the shape of it before the first one arrives is most of what makes it manageable.

01What a chargeback actually is

A chargeback is not a refund, and treating it like one is the single most common way a restaurant gets caught flat-footed by its first one. A refund is something the restaurant chooses to do, at its own pace, through its own decision. A chargeback is a reversal the customer's own bank initiates, on the bank's own timeline, because the customer told the bank the charge was wrong, unauthorized, or never fulfilled. The restaurant doesn't decide whether a chargeback happens — a customer's bank does, unilaterally, the moment the customer asks for one.

That distinction changes everything about how the situation is handled. A refund conversation starts with “what happened, and does that warrant money back.” A chargeback conversation starts already in motion — money has typically already moved back toward the customer provisionally, before anyone at the restaurant has said a word — and what a restaurant is actually doing at that point is presenting evidence to explain what happened, not deciding whether the reversal occurs in the first place.

02The notice the restaurant receives

When a payment provider reports a dispute, the notice goes to the restaurant — not the customer, who already has their money back and isn't the one who needs to respond. This is worth stating plainly because most of the refund and cancellation language elsewhere in this section is written from the customer's side; a chargeback notice is the one moment in this whole area where the restaurant is the one being written to directly:

Three things in that notice are worth reading twice. The deadline is real and it's the payment provider's deadline, not a flexible internal one — missing it can mean losing the dispute by default, regardless of what actually happened on the order. The “reason category” is the payment provider's own classification of what the customer claimed, not a legal finding about who's right — a category of “product not received” doesn't mean the provider has decided the product wasn't received, only that this is what the dispute is filed as. And the instruction not to fabricate, alter, or include unnecessary personal or payment information isn't boilerplate; evidence in a dispute response gets scrutinized, and inventing or padding it is worse than submitting a thinner but honest packet.

03What the diner's own complaint path looks like

It's worth understanding the other side of this too, because a chargeback usually isn't a customer who skipped every other option — it's often a customer who complained somewhere else first, or who simply didn't know a refund conversation with the restaurant was available. Dohos's own path for a customer complaint is separate from a chargeback and doesn't compete with it:

That middle sentence is the important one: a complaint being reviewed through the ordinary process never blocks a customer's right to go to their bank anyway. A customer isn't forced to choose one path and stick with it. Knowing this matters for how a restaurant frames its own evidence response: arguing that a customer “shouldn't have” disputed the charge because a complaint was already being handled isn't a strong position, because nothing about the complaint process was ever exclusive.

04How the outcome gets communicated

Once the payment provider or the card network actually decides the dispute, the restaurant is told the real outcome — plainly, without treating a network ruling as though it settles every possible question:

That last qualifier matters more than it might read at first. A card network's ruling on a dispute is real and has real financial consequences — a lost dispute usually means the money stays with the customer, sometimes with an additional fee on top — but it isn't automatically the final word on every question that might still be open between the restaurant and the customer, or between the restaurant and Dohos. It's the network's decision on the specific dispute claim it evaluated, not a comprehensive legal ruling on the underlying transaction.

05Getting an earlier statement wrong, and fixing it

Sometimes a fact stated during a dispute — an amount, a status, a timeline — turns out to be wrong after the fact, whether because new information came in or because something was misread the first time. When that happens, the correction is direct rather than quiet:

A correction names the earlier error rather than letting it sit alongside a newer, unlinked statement. If a restaurant relied on something stated earlier in a dispute conversation and it turns out to have been wrong, that gets acknowledged directly, with a path back to support for anyone who acted on the earlier version.

06What to actually do when a dispute notice arrives

1. Read the deadline first, before anything else. It's the one detail in the notice that isn't negotiable, and it's specific to that dispute, not a general support window.
2. Find the order. Orders is where the real record lives — items, the confirmed total, fulfillment details, and the order's own event history, all as they actually were, not as anyone remembers them.
3. Gather what's real, not what's convenient. Delivery or pickup confirmation, the order confirmation the customer actually received, any support conversation already on file about this same order. If a fact can't be verified, it doesn't go in the response.
4. Submit through the channel named in the notice, by the internal deadline given — not the payment provider's outer deadline, since the internal one exists to leave review time before that outer one arrives.
5. Wait for the network outcome, and treat it as what it is: a real, financially consequential decision on this specific claim, not a verdict on every related question.

07If something about this doesn't add up

• A dispute notice references an order that looks fine on the restaurant's own records. That's common, not a sign something's broken — a customer can genuinely believe something went wrong even when the restaurant's records show it didn't, and the evidence response is exactly where that gap gets explained with the real record.
• The deadline already passed, or is about to. Submit whatever accurate evidence exists right away anyway, through support if the normal channel isn't responding in time — a late but honest response is still worth submitting.
• The same order also has an open refund request. A dispute and a refund request shouldn't run at the same time on the same order; if both exist, that's worth flagging through support directly rather than letting the two processes work against each other unresolved.
• The outcome doesn't match what actually happened. A network's dispute decision isn't the end of every avenue — see the outcome language above. What's still open depends on the specific facts, which is exactly the kind of question support is built to route correctly.