What evidence does a DHgate dispute actually accept?

Why

• A dispute is decided against the record the platform holds, so anything created inside the platform outweighs anything created beside it. A promise typed into the message thread is a document that a reviewer can read; the same promise given by voice or in a separate chat application is an assertion about a conversation nobody else can inspect. The practical rule is that a statement which cannot be produced as a file will not be weighed.
• A listing snapshot taken before payment is the only way to show what you were sold. Titles, photographs and specification lines are edited after a sale, so a page captured later shows the edited version and proves the opposite of what you need. The snapshot plus the payment record fixes the terms the rest of the file is measured against, which is why it has to be captured on the day of purchase. The capture does not need to be elaborate: a saved page, a dated screenshot or a printed copy all serve, provided the specification lines and the price stay legible. What fails is a reconstruction written from memory weeks later, which reads as an opinion about a page nobody can inspect.
• Photographs work when two people read them the same way. The same fault shot with a scale reference, against a plain background, at a fixed distance and beside the packaging it arrived in is repeatable; a single dramatic close-up is read as a claim about severity that the image cannot carry. Shooting the whole set in one sitting on one surface also removes any question of whether two images show the same item.
• A timeline outperforms any individual item in the file. Messages in date order, the dispatch notice, the delivery scan and your own photographs, presented as one sequence, let a reviewer see when the problem was raised and whether the seller answered it. Both the platform route and any later escalation read the same file, so assembling it once serves the dispute and everything after it. Ordering matters as much as content, because a reviewer reading twenty items with no sequence has to reconstruct the transaction before judging it. A file that opens with the listing, moves through payment and messages, and closes with what arrived asks the reviewer to confirm a story rather than to assemble one. Dates do most of that work. A message sent on the day the parcel landed reads differently from the same words sent a fortnight later, and a reviewer weighing a response window will notice which of the two is in front of them. Timestamps are evidence rather than decoration.

When this answer flips

• The seller admits the fault inside the platform thread, because a written admission collapses the evidence list down to the payment record and the thread itself.
• The mismatch is measurable rather than descriptive, such as a size tag that disagrees with the listing, because one photograph carrying both the item and the measurement then settles the question on its own.
• The platform claim window has already closed, because the same file remains useful but the route changes from a dispute to a return or a bank reversal.

Three things to do next

1. Read what the desk counts as usable evidence
2. Build the photo set for a damage claim
3. Check the label against what shipped