BFCM Doesn’t End in November: The Chargeback Playbook I Shared at the Gorgias DTCx Webinar

At the Gorgias DTCx webinar, “Your BFCM Playbook: How DTC Brands Win the Biggest Weekend of the Year,” I presented alongside teams from Triple Whale, Open Collective, Consio, and TalentPop. I had ten minutes and one message: the revenue you win on Black Friday weekend remains exposed to disputes long after the sale. Plan for January and February - and keep records available beyond them when the applicable dispute window requires it.

I’ve spent my entire career since 2015 inside one problem - protecting merchants from payment fraud and chargeback abuse - at Riskified, Justt, and now Chargeflow. Every January, I watch the same movie play out. This post is the full version of what I told the webinar audience, so you can skip the ticket and steal the playbook.

The January Hangover

Here’s the pattern. Sales spike on Cyber Monday. Disputes don’t.

In the disputes Chargeflow processed, holiday disputes arrived weeks after the order. A Black Friday purchase can turn into a dispute around New Year’s, while a mid-December gift can generate one in January. The two waves overlap.

There’s a second effect most brands miss. The denominator matters: Visa uses same-month payments for its monthly monitoring calculation, while Mastercard uses the previous month’s payments. Under Visa’s VAMP framework, delayed fraud and dispute reports can raise your ratio if same-month settled payment volume falls. Track each network’s actual reports and applicable rules with your processor; January is not automatically the riskiest month for every brand.

You’re planning for the months after the weekend, too. The first 90 days are an operational focus, not a filing limit: Adyen’s dispute-timeframe guidance lists a typical 120-day cardholder window and longer windows in some delayed-delivery cases.

The Surprise: It’s Not Fraud

Everyone braces for fraud at BFCM. The data says brace for something else.

In the BFCM 2025 cohort shown in my webinar chart, “it never arrived” claims over-indexed against normal orders, while fraud claims under-indexed. That comparison points to a practical priority: delivery, clear billing and responsive support.

That changes where you should spend your preparation time. The biggest incremental risk isn’t necessarily someone stealing a card. It’s a legitimate customer, a late package, a confusing statement descriptor, or a support interaction that never got resolved.

Why? Carrier overload. Porch piracy. Gift shipments to addresses the cardholder doesn’t recognize. And plain confusion - including customers who don’t recognize the charge on their statement. (Quick aside: go check that your billing descriptor matches your storefront name. It’s a two-minute fix that kills a real slice of disputes.)

The takeaway: BFCM chargeback prevention needs delivery, clarity and CX work alongside fraud controls. Those are areas your team can improve. Here are the five things to do before traffic hits.

1. Audit Your Policies Before Traffic Hits

Returns and refunds. Shipping, with realistic delivery windows. Pre-order and backorder disclosures. Subscription and trial terms if you’re running BFCM offers.

Two things almost nobody does:

2. Make Refunds Easier Than Disputes

A chargeback is what a refund becomes when nobody answers.

A refund gives the customer their money back and may leave you with product or fulfillment costs. A chargeback can add dispute fees, response work and monitoring exposure to the lost payment. During peak, weigh those costs before escalating a borderline refund into a prolonged argument. Check for an existing dispute before issuing a separate refund so you avoid duplicate reimbursement.

During peak, response time matters more than most teams realize. A customer who gets a fast answer is much less likely to solve the problem by calling their bank.

So during peak, staff for first-response speed, turn on self-serve returns, put contact info on the order confirmation where people actually look, and refund the borderline cases. Support speed is chargeback prevention.

3. Over-Communicate on Shipping

Carrier delays during peak aren’t a risk - they’re a certainty. Plan the communication now: tracking on every order, proactive emails the moment something slips, delivery confirmation on everything, signature on high-AOV orders.

Remember, “it never arrived” is the dispute type that over-indexes in the webinar’s BFCM cohort. Delivery evidence directly addresses that claim, and the managed-dispute sample below shows a higher win rate when that evidence is available.

If you only fix one operational thing on this list, fix this one.

4. Don’t Over-Tighten Your Fraud Filters

The counterintuitive one. Every year, I see some version of the same reaction the week before Black Friday. Traffic forecasts go up, everyone gets nervous about fraud, and someone decides this is the moment to tighten every rule. But false declines can be expensive. Block a good order and you risk three things at once: the sale, the customer’s next purchase, and the ad spend that acquired them.

And remember what the webinar cohort showed: fraud claims under-indexed on holiday orders. That does not mean fraud disappears. Review rules against both fraud losses and legitimate-order declines, then calibrate to your own customers and traffic.

5. Build Your Evidence Machine Now

This is the one that pays off when holiday disputes arrive. Decide now what you capture on every order and where the records will be stored.

You can only respond well to later disputes if the original orders were documented. Some evidence cannot be reconstructed after the fact. One more reason to preserve history: Visa’s Compelling Evidence 3.0 uses qualifying prior transactions and matching identity signals for eligible card-absent fraud disputes. It has specific eligibility requirements; retaining evidence alone does not guarantee a win.

The Pre-BFCM Chargeback Checklist

Save this checklist and work through it before the traffic hits.

Or Let Automation Do the February Work

Everything above is doable manually. But here’s the honest version of what February looks like: hundreds of disputes landing at once, each one needing evidence pulled from five different systems, formatted to each network’s requirements, and submitted on a deadline - right when your team is exhausted from peak season.

That’s the problem we built Chargeflow to solve. Chargeflow connects to your store, detects incoming disputes, assembles available evidence such as delivery confirmation, customer history and policy acceptance, and submits responses for supported disputes. Prevention alerts can help resolve eligible cases before they become formal chargebacks. Chargeflow Automation uses success-based recovery pricing; Alerts have separate deflection pricing.

If you want to walk into BFCM knowing January is handled, book a demo or sign up - setup takes a few minutes, and there’s no better time to switch it on than before the wave hits.

Have a profitable BFCM - and a quiet January.

Dan Moshkovich leads marketing and strategy at Chargeflow. He presented this playbook at the Gorgias DTCx webinar “Your BFCM Playbook: How DTC Brands Win the Biggest Weekend of the Year.” The holiday statistics and win-rate comparisons above come from disputes processed by Chargeflow and reflect the cohorts and periods identified above.