You expect the dispute to be decided on fairness

The situation on the other side

One member of staff, a queue of cases, and two people who both sound sincere. They were not there. They have no way to know what arrived in a parcel, whether it was as described, or which side is remembering the week correctly. They have exactly one thing that neither party can rewrite, which is the platform record.

So the decision procedure converges on the record whether or not anybody planned it that way. It is not a preference for coldness. It is the only method available to somebody who has to decide something with no independent access to the facts.

What gets read, in order

1. The order timeline. Created, paid, marked dispatched, dispute opened. All timestamped and not editable by either side.
2. The message thread on the platform, in sequence, in the words used at the time.
3. Whether the stated window had actually passed when the dispute was opened.
4. Tracking events, where they exist, mostly for their dates.
5. Everything either party wrote after the dispute opened, which is read last and weighted least.

That final line is the one people find hardest. The long careful message you write when you are already in trouble arrives at the bottom of the pile, competing with a thread that was written before anybody had a reason to shape it.

What this changes about the order itself

• Write the important things on the platform, at the time, plainly. A message saying nothing has arrived and it is day twelve is worth more later than any amount of explanation afterwards.
• Put dates in your messages. An arbiter reconstructing a timeline will use whatever is already written down.
• Keep every conversation in one place. A thread with holes in it, because part of it happened elsewhere, reads as a thread with holes in it.
• Do not send angry messages. They stay in the record and they make a reasonable case look unreasonable.
• Open the dispute inside the window. Late is the most common reason a good case fails.

What a decision is not

It is not a finding of fact and it is not compensation. It is an allocation of the funds sitting in escrow for that order, and the range of outcomes is bounded by that. Partial splits are common because a split is the honest answer when a reader cannot tell who is right, and being told so is unsatisfying to both sides at once.

Which is why the practical advice in this section is all about the order rather than the case. By the time a dispute is open, most of what will decide it has already been written.