Most marketplaces have some version of this button. It's usually called "File a dispute," it's usually buried two clicks deep in a help menu, and it usually shows up next to a paragraph about arbitration that nobody reads. The wording does a job: it tells you, before you even tap it, that what comes next is going to be slow and adversarial. Most people who would have legitimately reported something just close the tab.
We renamed ours to "Report a problem." The internal database column is still called dispute — we kept the term as a developer-facing label so the codebase stays clean — but the customer never sees it. The button on a booking says Report a problem, and that's the only language we use in the product.
If you call a button "File a dispute," you're telling the user: this is a formal process, this is conflict, you'd better be sure. That filters out a lot of real complaints — not because they're not real, but because most people don't see themselves as the kind of person who files disputes. They see themselves as someone whose laundry didn't get folded the way they asked. That's a problem worth reporting. It might not be worth a dispute, depending on how you define one.
A marketplace that suppresses problem-reports has nothing to act on. We're at the stage where every signal matters, and the cost of missing one because of a scary button is much higher than the cost of reading a few reports that turn out to be misunderstandings. Lower the bar, hear more, fix more. That's the whole calculation.
The flow is intentionally short. You're not opening a case; you're telling us what happened.
We acknowledge every report within a few hours during business hours, and we're back to you with a real reply (not just an acknowledgement) within 48 hours. If the situation is urgent — payment got captured by mistake, something feels unsafe — there's a line at the top of the report screen to flag it, and we look at flagged reports first.
Most reports get resolved between the customer and the Welper, with us watching to make sure it goes somewhere reasonable. Sometimes a Welper reads what happened and offers to come back and finish the work; sometimes a misunderstanding gets cleared up because the customer didn't realize an extra was an extra. We keep the conversation in one thread so neither side has to repeat themselves.
When that doesn't get there, we step in. We look at the booking, the messages, the report, and any attachments, and we make a call. We try hard to make calls that match the bible we keep for ourselves: the customer pays only for work that got done; a Welper who finished their part fairly gets paid for it; both sides know what we decided and why.
We do not anonymize reports back to the Welper. If you tell us something, the Welper knows what was said. We think that's the right tradeoff: it keeps the conversation honest, and it means a Welper who did good work can defend it. The exception is if the report involves safety; those go to a separate review path that doesn't surface details to the other party.
A report is a gift. Someone took the time to write down something that wasn't right, instead of leaving and never coming back. Marketplaces that bury the button get fewer reports and read fewer signals; marketplaces that surface the button get more reports and find more things to fix. The math is not subtle.
If something has gone wrong with a booking, the button is right there in the booking detail. We read every report. We answer every report.
— The Welpco team