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Responding to a Stripe "general" dispute

"General" is not a story. Stripe's dispute reason can be the literal value general, or one of seven less common reasons Stripe reports as their own values (listed below) — and some of those cannot be won with merchant evidence at all. This page covers all eight. There is no generic response to any of them. Your first job is to find the exact reason value on the dispute record and handle that reason on its own terms.

Reason by reason

Reason	Winnable by evidence?	Handling
general	Sometimes	Find what the customer is actually claiming (Stripe's dispute record and the customer's own words) and apply that category's template in full. If no specific story can be identified, we don't fight it with a generic packet.
debit_not_authorized	Sometimes	Run the Fraudulent playbook in full — its minimum-evidence checklist and refusal triggers apply unchanged.
customer_initiated	Sometimes	Map to the closest substantive category by what the dispute is actually about (often product or cancellation) and apply that category's template in full.
noncompliant	Rarely	Only if the specific compliance allegation is identifiable and answerable with records (for example, recurring-billing disclosure proof). "Noncompliant with what?" must be answerable from the dispute record before any drafting.
bank_cannot_process	No	Instrument/bank-side failure. Merchant evidence cannot cure it.
check_returned	No	Instrument-level failure.
incorrect_account_details	No	An account-data problem; not a question about your conduct.
insufficient_funds	No	About the cardholder's balance, not your conduct.

The honest answer for the bottom four is: don't pay anyone — including us — to fight them. The fix, where one exists, is in your payment setup or the customer's bank details, not in an evidence packet.

Deadline rules

• The authoritative deadline is the evidence due-by date on the dispute in Stripe. If you don't respond by then, you automatically lose the dispute. Submit at least 72 hours early.
• Amex/Discover may start as inquiries (warning_needs_response); unanswered Discover inquiries can become unchallengeable disputes.

If the reason is mappable, the mapped category decides

• ME-G1 — the dispute is mapped to a substantive story per the table above.
• ME-G2 — the mapped category's minimum-evidence criteria are ALL met. Its refusal triggers are inherited in full — nothing is relaxed because the label said "general."
• ME-G3 — your narrative names the exact reason and the substantive story in its first two sentences. An issuer who has to guess what you're answering will guess against you.

Common mistakes

• Sending a boilerplate packet. This category punishes generic responses hardest. Exhibits come from the mapped category only — nothing from other categories "just in case."
• Fighting the un-fightable four. A polished packet about insufficient_funds is still about the customer's bank balance. Save the fee.
• Guessing the story on customer_initiated. If no substantive story is identifiable from the dispute record, a response is unlikely to help — that uncertainty is worth stating rather than papering over.

Other dispute categories

• Fraudulent
• Subscription canceled
• Product not received
• Product unacceptable
• Unrecognized
• Credit not processed
• All reason codes — Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover