BarkBox cut chargeback dispute prep from hours to one minute

BarkBox makes toys and treats for dogs and sells them direct and through retailers such as Target, Walmart, Sam’s Club and Costco. Selling through retailers brings a steady flow of paperwork, and BarkBox’s inbound team handled much of it by hand.

Preparing a chargeback dispute took hours. Chargebacks also had no set process: no clear owner for each case and no reporting on them.

Sales orders had the same problem. Retailers emailed PDFs, and the team copied each SKU and quantity into BarkBox’s system. A multi-page order could take hours, and one wrong SKU or quantity became an error someone had to find later.

We mapped each process end to end with the people who ran it. For chargebacks, that meant agreeing the process before automating any of it: who owns each ticket, what happens at each step and what gets reported. Automating the old way of working would only have made the errors arrive faster.

Then we built the automations in n8n. Each one keeps a person in the loop: when an unusual case comes through, the workflow flags it for review instead of pushing it on.

BarkBox’s team has Loom videos and written documentation for every workflow, so it can run and change them itself, down to adding a new retailer.

• A chargeback process with an owner for every ticket and reporting across all of them.
• Automation that prepares each chargeback dispute, with human checks on unusual cases.
• A workflow that reads retailer sales-order PDFs and puts each SKU and quantity into a Google Sheet, ready to upload.
• Documentation and Loom walkthroughs for every workflow.