Chargeback Ratio
The percentage of a merchant’s transactions that end in a chargeback — a key health metric watched by card networks.
A chargeback ratio is the number of disputes you receive expressed as a percentage of your transactions. It is the single number card networks use to decide whether your account is acceptable, and it matters far more than the raw count of disputes.
The trap is that there is no one ratio. Visa and Mastercard calculate it differently, over different denominators and different time windows, so the same business genuinely has two ratios that disagree. Mastercard's excessive program measures chargebacks against the prior month's transaction count, which means a month where sales fall can push your ratio up even if disputes stay flat.
Because the denominator is transactions rather than revenue, low-ticket and high-volume businesses get more headroom than high-ticket ones. A merchant selling a small number of expensive items can breach a threshold on a handful of disputes, which is why high-ticket sellers are underwritten more cautiously.
Track the ratio monthly against both network definitions rather than waiting for your processor to raise it. By the time a monitoring notice arrives you are already in remediation, and the fastest way out is a run of clean months, which takes time you will not have if the first you hear of it is the notice.
See how peptide accounts are kept inside network dispute thresholds.
Peptides merchant account