Most merchants, especially those operating in the high-risk industries, lose more chargebacks than they win. Based on our understanding, the average win rate in merchants across high-risk industries sits between 20% to 40%. That is the harsh reality. But there’s also a truth that most people actually miss.
Low win rates are not not because disputes are unwinnable. They are there because merchants are actually unprepared to handle such situations.
Winning chargebacks is about precision and not only about efforts. Sending random screenshots or generic response does not work in real-life situations.
Credit card issuing banks are basically looking forward to get structured, relevant, and reason code-specific evidences from merchants. If your response doesn’t directly counter the claim raised by the customer, then it gets ignored. High-performing merchants, especially those operating in industries such as CBD, vape, headshops, NSFW, AI, and SaaS, as well as marketplaces, are those merchants that are basically doing serious volume. And they can push the win rate to up to 50% by systemizing the dispute handling process.
Such merchants intelligently track the patterns, they pre-build evidence templates, and respond quickly. They don’t just treat disputes as isolated events. They actually treat them as a data system. So the real game is not about what’s your average win rate. It is how disciplined your dispute handling process is, because that is what basically separates losing merchants from dominant merchants.