Most merchants fight every chargeback because the payment company's dashboard (Stripe, Shopify Payments and the like) offers a one-click submit button. Chargeback services quote win rates as if they applied to every case. On a real set of disputes that habit loses money. Roughly a third of chargebacks are cases you should refund without writing a response. The first job is to sort those out before anything is submitted.
Refund when you are at fault. That means goods that never arrived, services that were not performed, or a refund the customer asked for and never received. The customer is right in those cases, and their bank will rule against you however the reply is written. A lost dispute also raises your chargeback ratio, so fighting these cases costs expert time and adds monitoring risk.
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Small disputes follow different arithmetic. A credible reply takes one to two hours from someone who knows what they are doing. On a $60 dispute, even a 70% win rate loses money once that time is priced in. For most small and mid-sized merchants the break-even sits near $200 per dispute. Merchants who fight below that usually never priced the time.
Missing records settle the question too. If you cannot produce what the dispute reason (the code on your notice) requires, there is nothing to argue from. For Visa 13.1, that is delivery confirmation. For Visa 10.4, it is the AVS (billing-address check) and CVV results. For Visa 13.7, it is the cancellation policy and the record that the customer accepted it. Padding the page with terms-of-service quotes, generic shipping policies or a screenshot of the original order tells the bank you know the case is weak. Refund these, and spend the time fixing how you capture records before the next chargeback arrives.
Fight the cases where you delivered the goods or service and the terms were met. The amount should be large enough that a win pays for the expert time several times over. The records should match what the dispute reason asks for. Those are the cases where your reply has real ground. Most of your recovery comes from this decision to fight or refund, made before any drafting starts.
Some disputes come from customers disputing a purchase they made. Others come from your own mistakes. Fighting the first and refunding the second are both reasonable. Deciding in the first hour after the notice arrives, case by case, keeps your disputes profitable.