Klarna’s overall dispute process

At Klarna we consider a dispute as to any case where the customer challenges their liability to pay. These cases are categorized into different dispute reasons:

• Returns (a customer returns the full or a part of their order)
• Goods not received (a customer did not receive (parts of) their order)
• Incorrect Invoice (a customer claims to have received an invoice that is incorrect, for example, missing discounts or items on the invoice are incorrect)
• Faulty goods (a customer received an item that is broken, or parts of it are missing)
• Already paid (a customer claims to have already paid the Klarna invoice, for example, by stating that it's paid to you directly)
• Unauthorized purchases (a customer reports they have never made the purchase)
• High-risk orders are not considered to be actual disputes, since these are not raised by our customers. These orders have been identified as potentially high risk, based on Klarna's internal alarm and flagging systems, set in place to protect our merchants from potential fraudulent activities.

Step 1

When a customer opens a dispute with Klarna, we’ll automatically pause the invoice and advice the customer to:

• return the items in case of returns
• reach out to you in case of other dispute reasons (goods not received, faulty goods, and others)

Step 2

After the customer reports a dispute/ return to Klarna the merchant has 21 days to resolve the case (resolution time). Only 'unauthorized purchases' (fraud raised by customers) has a resolution time of 0 days due to the urgency.
All disputes are visible in the Disputes App (& API) once they have been raised by the customer.

The time period for you and your customer to resolve the dispute before it's escalated (Resolution time)

Step 3

If you, the merchant, and the customer can't reach a solution on your own within the given resolution time (21 days), Klarna will step in to investigate. We first will evaluate the information provided by the customer. This will help us determine if a dispute is still valid or if it should be rejected. If the dispute is valid, Klarna’s support team will reach out to you, the merchant, via the Disputes App in Merchant Portal (or the Disputes API). A dispute request is always sent with a deadline, indicating when you are able to submit the requested information. The Deadline for the first request is 14 days for all dispute reasons, with the exception of Unauthorized Purchases, where the deadline is 7 days. For each follow-up request* sent to you (with a maximum of 5 requests) you have a deadline of 7 days. Should you need to add to your response you have 60 minutes from submission to add, for example, information or attachments. Once the deadline has passed you will no longer be able to defend the case.

*Adyen and Stripe do not allow follow-up requests, limiting the amount of requests to 1.

Step 4

After receiving the necessary information from you, the merchant, Klarna’s support team will make a decision and resolve the dispute. 

• If the dispute is resolved in favor of the customer, you will receive a chargeback
• If the dispute is resolved in your favor, the customer’s invoice will be re-activated.