How Credit Card Dispute Resolution Works: A Systems Design Perspective

This article, the first in a two-part series on payments-systems engineering, takes a systems-design view of credit card dispute resolution. It walks through the publicly documented chargeback lifecycle and shows how engineers model it as an explicit state machine - including loop-backs such as re-bills and reopened cases, and distinct outcomes where "withdrawn" is not "merchant won." It introduces a practitioner's Four-Layer Dispute Model (policy, state, orchestration, evidence) that separates frequently changing rules from stable workflow, and covers case correlation, deadline-driven prioritization, reason-code-specific evidence capture, and skill-based routing. The article is vendor-neutral and based solely on public card-network rules and publicly available knowledge. A companion article covers fraud detection and recovery.