About Upstream Chargeback Solutions

Why "Upstream"

The name is the method

Deductions arrive downstream — on a remittance, weeks after the event, coded in a shorthand nobody outside the retailer's accounts payable team is meant to understand. That is where almost every recovery vendor operates: at the end of the pipe, catching what has already been lost.

The dollars, though, are decided upstream. A cost change acknowledged three days after the PO cut. An ASN transmitted without an expiry date. A collect order routed late. An allowance loaded into the wrong EDI segment. A promotional deal whose dates in the retailer's system never matched the deal you signed. By the time it appears on a remittance, the outcome was set weeks earlier.

Upstream Chargeback Solutions was built to work both ends of that pipe: recover what has already been taken, then go back up the process and remove the reason it was taken. A recovered dollar is worth exactly one dollar. A cause that stops firing is worth that dollar every month for as long as you sell the account.

The firm

Small on purpose

Upstream was founded in 2023 and is deliberately a small senior team rather than a volume claims operation. The economics of this industry push most providers in one of two directions: sell a software licence and let the supplier do the disputing, or build an offshore claims mill that files the same template against every code and wins whatever it wins.

Neither works well for a mid-market CPG brand. Software still needs somebody with retailer knowledge to operate it. A claims mill has no incentive to tell you that the reason you receive the same chargeback every month is an item-master field nobody has looked at since 2021.

We take fewer clients, staff them with people who have decades of combined trade-finance and retailer-side experience, and get paid only out of what we recover. That is the entire business model, and it is what keeps the incentives pointed at your P&L.

Founded: 2023. Team: 2–10. Based: New York / New Jersey metro. Clients: CPG manufacturers and suppliers nationwide. Upstream Chargeback Solutions on LinkedIn.

Leadership

Who you actually work with

Upstream was founded by Jacqueline Korner, who leads client engagements directly. Senior involvement is not a sales-cycle promise here — with a team this size it is simply how the work gets done.

Until those are published, the honest version is the one above: a 2023-founded boutique, senior operators, decades of combined experience across trade finance and the retailer side of the desk.

Scope

What we are not

The word “chargeback” is used by more than one industry, and searching for one reliably turns up the other. Upstream works exclusively on retail trade deductions: money withheld by retailers and distributors from supplier invoices under a vendor agreement. That is the whole of our practice.

We are also not a software vendor, not a reseller, not a broker, and not an audit firm working the other side of the table. We do not take contingency work from retailers, which is the arrangement that generates a good share of the post-audit claims our clients receive.

Read the definitional piece on deduction management vs. chargeback management vs. dispute management if the terminology in this industry has ever cost you an hour.