Unit economics
Disputed transactions as a share of settled ones, computed monthly by the card schemes — the one number in commerce with an automatic consequence attached.
Also called Chargeback ratio · VAMP ratio · Доля споров · Чарджбэки
Formula
Dispute ratio = Disputed transactions ÷ Settled transactions
- Disputed transactions
- fraud reports and non-fraud disputes, combined under Visa's current programme
- Settled transactions
- the same period, on the same merchant identifier
The denominator is the merchant identifier rather than the business. A single high-dispute product line can carry an otherwise healthy company over the threshold if both sit on one MID.
Crossing the threshold does not require a complaint, a regulator or an investigation. The ratio is computed from settlement data, and exceeding it enrols the merchant in a monitoring programme with a fee charged per dispute, a remediation plan agreed through the acquirer, and eventually the withdrawal of card acceptance.
Visa lowered its excessive threshold from 2.2% to 1.5% on 1 April 2026 for the United States, Canada, the EU, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. CEMEA, which is the region a UAE merchant sits in, remains at 2.2%. Mastercard runs a parallel programme keyed to a ratio combined with a monthly volume floor.
These figures come from acquirer and industry summaries because the schemes do not publish their operating regulations openly, and several summaries disagree in the decimal. The threshold that applies to a given merchant identifier is a question for the acquirer holding it.
Most remediation effort goes into contesting individual disputes, which does not move the ratio meaningfully. The volume is set upstream by subscription mechanics — a trial that converts without notice, a cancellation that takes six clicks, a charge the buyer believed they had avoided. Those produce disputes at a rate no representment process can absorb.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.