BigCommerce Chargebacks: Why Your Payment Gateway Decides
BigCommerce chargebacks have no native process on the platform itself. Every dispute gets decided by whichever payment gateway processed the charge. Since June 2026, that same choice also decides whether BigCommerce adds its new Open Payment Provider Fee on top.
Two BigCommerce stores can run the same theme and still get different dispute outcomes. One picked Stripe. The other picked a gateway with a tighter deadline and a bigger fee.
I saw that pattern over and over when I opened up merchants' processor setups in a support role.
Read this and you'll know which dashboard owns the dispute sitting in your inbox, and which gateway keeps your total cost down.
Key takeaways
Want disputes stopped before your gateway ever sees them? Our chargeback alerts arrive while a refund still closes the case.
What handles a BigCommerce chargeback?
Your payment gateway holds the money and decides the chargeback, because BigCommerce never touches the funds. Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Square, and BigCommerce Payments each receive the dispute, set your response deadline, and charge their own fee.
BigCommerce is the storefront and the order system, so it records what sold, to whom, and for how much. The gateway took the card, moved the money, and deals directly with the card networks.
When a cardholder's bank reverses a charge, the notice shows up in the gateway's dashboard, and your evidence goes there too.
A chargeback is a reversal the customer's bank forces on you.
Once that bank steps in, BigCommerce has no admin setting that changes the outcome and no appeal.
Does BigCommerce have built-in fraud protection?
Fraud screening on a BigCommerce store comes from your gateway or a third-party app. BigCommerce's own order data shows no native risk score field, only a fraud-review flag that depends on the gateway. Shopify puts a risk score in front of the merchant. BigCommerce leaves the order screen bare.
Any screening still happens, inside the gateway.
Three checks run at that level:
- Address verification against the billing address on file
- Card security codes entered at checkout
- 3D Secure, which pushes the check to the issuing bank
Anything more means installing an app from the marketplace, and the features worth paying for come up further down.
The gap is on the platform side. Run Stripe or PayPal on BigCommerce and you still get that gateway's full fraud toolkit.
Its verdict stays in the gateway, so open the transaction in your gateway's dashboard to read it.
So your gateway choice matters more here than it would on a platform with its own risk engine.
The gateways BigCommerce merchants actually use
BigCommerce merchants run BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, or Square, and the five split on what a case costs and where you answer it. Here they are in order:
- BigCommerce Payments, the platform's own gateway
- Stripe, the gateway sending us the most alerts
- PayPal, the cross-border default
- Authorize.net, the gateway with a separate processor behind it
- Square, the one that charges nothing per dispute
Here is how the five compare, before each one in turn:
1. BigCommerce Payments (built on PayPal)
BigCommerce Payments is the platform's own gateway, offered by PayPal. One vendor, one bill, and dispute handling that follows PayPal's rules.
The appeal is that everything happens in one control panel and nothing needs connecting.
"BigCommerce Payments" is the front end on top of PayPal's processing. Look up what a dispute costs or how long you have to answer, and the answer comes from PayPal's schedule.
2. Stripe
Stripe charges $15 per dispute and takes the fee whether you win or lose. You answer inside the Stripe Dashboard, on a structured evidence form that asks for specific documents.
That form is the part merchants underuse. It has separate fields for the receipt, the delivery confirmation, and your refund policy.
Stripe weighs a packet that fills the right fields over a long narrative that fills none.
Win the case and Stripe's dispute fee has its own rules about when it comes back.
3. PayPal
PayPal charges $20 per chargeback on card transactions, the highest per-case fee of the five. Disputes run through the PayPal Resolution Center, on PayPal's own claim clock.
What you're paying for is checkout conversion. Buyers who won't hand their card to a store they don't know will still pay through PayPal. Cross-border sellers keep it on for that reason alone.
There's a tradeoff. PayPal reviews the claim itself, so you argue to PayPal and the issuing bank never hears from you.
4. Authorize.net
Authorize.net is a gateway with a separate processor behind it, so your merchant service provider decides your disputes and sets the fee. That extra party changes where the work happens.
So two stores both running Authorize.net can face completely different terms.
Our Authorize.net chargeback guide sets out which parts of a dispute the gateway handles and which parts your provider owns.
5. Square
Square charges no separate chargeback fee, which makes it the cheapest of the five per disputed case. When a dispute goes against you, you lose the transaction amount and that's the whole cost.
A zero fee reads better than it works out in practice.
Square is built for in-person and hybrid retail, so a BigCommerce store selling entirely online gives up features to get the saving. Square also falls outside the Embedded list, so those savings meet a platform fee.
Square's chargeback policy sets out how the process runs.
The 2026 Open Payment Provider Fee changes the math
On the Core plan, BigCommerce charges 2% of order value for every order run through a gateway outside its Embedded Payment Providers list. Growth pays 1% and Scale pays 0.6%, all effective since June 1, 2026. It stacks on top of the chargeback fee your gateway already charges.
The Embedded Payment Providers list is the exemption. BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, and Checkout.com are all on it, so orders through those carry no extra platform fee.
Pick a gateway off the list and BigCommerce charges you on gross merchandise value. You pay whether or not a single customer disputes anything.
Say you're running $50,000 a month through a gateway off the list. Here's what each plan costs you at that volume:
On Core, that $12,000 a year buys whatever the non-Embedded gateway does better. Dispute fees differ by a few dollars.
Check your plan in your BigCommerce account settings before you assume you're exposed, because Enterprise negotiates its own terms and escapes the fee. The fee also covers manual and purchase-order orders, so a B2B seller taking orders offline pays it there too.
Where prevention actually pays off first
Prevention pays off first on Stripe, because most of the alerts we handle come from Stripe merchants. We see that gateway most, so we have the most prevention data on it.
The fee gap tells you what one case costs.
Your case volume decides your actual bill, and that comes from your category and your customers, not from your gateway's price list. Catching a dispute early is what changes the volume, because you can still refund an alert before the bank turns it into a chargeback.
The full breakdown is in our alert-processor data.
Read the scope before you apply it. We only counted merchants enrolled with us, so the numbers tell you about gateways rather than about BigCommerce stores.
We don't record BigCommerce as a processor at all, because it runs the storefront while your gateway moves the money.
Alerts work outside your gateway entirely. Ethoca and Verifi's alert networks run between the card networks and your processor, so they work the same whichever gateway your store uses.
Refunding a $60 order beats paying $20 and losing the $60 anyway.
See what Chargeback.io's alert coverage reaches on your processor.
Choosing a gateway for your BigCommerce store
Choose your BigCommerce gateway on three things, weighing them together rather than on the processing rate alone. Which gateway you pick decides whether you pay the platform fee, and what you sell decides how many disputes you get:
- Fee-exemption status, whether your gateway is Embedded or not
- Dispute exposure, set by your category and order value
- Fraud-app fit, since the platform screens nothing itself
The sections below take them one at a time. Before you model any of it, our chargeback prevention ROI calculator puts a number on what your current dispute volume costs.
Best gateway for a high-risk BigCommerce store
A high-risk BigCommerce store usually ends up on Authorize.net with a specialist acquirer behind it, because Stripe and Square decline the categories outright. The gateway itself is available to you.
The open question is which merchant service provider will underwrite you.
You get classified as a high-risk merchant account on your category and your average order value, neither of which your BigCommerce setup touches.
Your chargeback rate is part of that same classification, and it follows you across platforms too. Expect a rolling reserve and a higher per-transaction rate as the price of acceptance.
Here you pay both costs at once, because Authorize.net is outside the Embedded exemption. A high-risk Core-plan store pays the 2% platform fee on top of a processing rate that is already high.
If your margins are thin, work out your monthly sales times that same 2% rate. Compare that against the higher rate a specialist acquirer on an Embedded gateway charges.
Third-party fraud-prevention apps on BigCommerce
A fraud app on BigCommerce gives you an order-level risk signal before the charge, and that is the whole of what it does. Screening changes which orders you accept, while the dispute process stays exactly as it was.
Judge the marketplace options on what they check rather than on their claimed catch rate. Four features are worth having:
- Device fingerprinting that ties an order to the hardware behind it
- Velocity rules that flag repeat attempts from one card or address
- A manual review queue you can work through daily
- Rules you can tune to your own product mix
Require the app to show which signal drove the score, so you can override it when it's wrong.
Screening only catches strangers. The customer who genuinely bought from you and then forgot still disputes the charge, and no app sees that coming.
BigCommerce vs. Shopify: does the platform itself matter?
Shopify puts a native fraud risk score on the order and BigCommerce leaves that space empty, and on both your gateway decides the dispute. So the platform changes what you see, and never who rules on the case.
The same holds when you move your money.
Our guide on switching payment gateways explains why your dispute rate follows you across any move like this one.
Responding to a BigCommerce chargeback
Winning means matching your evidence to the specific gateway's process and the specific reason the customer gave. Each gateway takes its own packet in its own place, listed in the "Where you respond" column above.
Beyond the format, the reason drives what belongs in the packet. Send shipping proof against a "not as described" claim and you've answered a question nobody asked, whichever gateway you sent it to.
Pull the order record from BigCommerce, then upload it in the dashboard the table names for your gateway.
The deadline decides everything else. Miss it and the case closes in the customer's favor automatically, no matter how strong your evidence was. BigCommerce offers no appeal.
Your gateway's clock is the only one running.
FAQ
Does BigCommerce charge a chargeback fee?
No. Your gateway sets the whole dispute fee you pay, and the amount varies by gateway (see the comparison table above).
Can I switch gateways without rebuilding my store?
Yes. Gateways connect and disconnect in Store Setup > Payments, so your products, theme, and orders stay untouched, and open disputes stay with the gateway that processed them.
Does switching gateways lower my chargeback rate?
No. A new gateway changes your fee, your deadline, and your dashboard, while the customers and reasons behind your disputes stay exactly the same.
Is the Open Payment Provider Fee a chargeback fee?
No. BigCommerce takes a percentage of every eligible order, and a chargeback fee is a flat charge your gateway adds per dispute.
How we sourced our data
The alert-volume finding in this article comes from anonymized, aggregated data across the merchants enrolled on the Chargeback.io platform. It measures our own enrolled base rather than BigCommerce stores or the wider industry.
We report category totals as shares of alerts with a recorded processor.
The split describes where disputes concentrate among the merchants we protect.
