The dashboard hides roughly half the cost of a lost chargeback.
A $200 chargeback that the merchant declines to fight produces a $215 line item on the dashboard: the disputed amount returned to the cardholder, plus the non-refundable dispute fee. That number is half of what the chargeback actually costs the business. The other half is hidden in line items the dashboard does not aggregate and the merchant rarely thinks to add up.
Take the same $200 order. Cost of goods sold was perhaps $70, gone with the shipped product the customer kept. Another $6 in non-refundable credit-card processing fees disappears with the original transaction. The customer-acquisition cost, which for a typical direct-to-consumer merchant runs $25 to $60 per order, is wiped because the order has been reversed. Add another $8 for the shipping label in carrier fees, plus labor in pick-and-pack. None of these appears in the chargeback record.
Add them and the true cost of the $200 chargeback runs to $370 or more, depending on the COGS and acquisition cost of the specific merchant. Over a year and a few dozen disputes, the gap between the dashboard total and the actual loss is large enough to be the difference between a marginally profitable line of business and a clearly losing one. A merchant who treats chargebacks at the dashboard's accounting is, in effect, running the business on the wrong number.