Consumers across global markets are paying more for goods and services in part because of a cost most of them have never heard of, according to new research from Chargebacks911, a global leader in dispute resolution and chargeback management. Nearly four in ten merchants now say that the costs associated with payment disputes and chargeback fraud are influencing the prices they charge customers.
The finding reframes a problem that has long been treated as a payments industry concern into something with much broader economic consequences. Chargeback abuse does not disappear when merchants absorb it; increasingly, it gets priced in.
“Every fraudulent dispute creates costs that go well beyond the original transaction,” said Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911. “When enough of those costs accumulate, businesses have little choice but to recover them somewhere else. Increasingly, that means higher prices that are paid by the honest majority of customers who had nothing to do with the problem.”
The 2026 Chargeback Field Report, built on proprietary survey data from merchants across the U.S., UK and global markets, finds that the financial impact of a single chargeback extends far beyond the value of the original transaction. Once chargeback fees, lost inventory, fraud prevention expenses and the operational cost of managing disputes are factored in, merchants lose on average more than four dollars for every dollar disputed.
Nearly 62 per cent of respondents say dispute volumes have increased over the past three years, with the rise driven in part by the growing ease with which consumers can initiate a chargeback with their issuing bank. In many markets, cardholders can now file a dispute with a single tap on their banking app, often encountering less friction than the original checkout process.
The compounding effect of rising chargeback volumes and multiplying costs per dispute is beginning to show up in pricing decisions across a range of sectors and geographies. With 38% of merchants reportedly passing chargeback costs to consumers—up from 32.5 per cent since the previous report—suggests the trend is accelerating rather than stabilising.
Alongside formal chargebacks, a second and related cost pressure is building. Refund abuse, where customers submit return requests that fall outside merchant policies, does not involve the card network dispute process but creates significant financial strain nonetheless.
On average, merchants estimate that abusive refund requests account for 27.1 per cent of all returns. Nearly one-third report that most of their returns involve some form of abuse. Among respondents, 62 per cent describe refund abuse as a moderate or significant concern.
The dynamic places merchants in a difficult position. Businesses that tighten return policies to reduce refund abuse risk driving customers toward formal chargebacks instead. Those that maintain lenient policies in order to reduce dispute volumes face rising refund losses. However, neither approach resolves the underlying consumer behaviour.
“Refund abuse and chargeback fraud are two sides of the same problem,” said Eaton. “When merchants make returns easier to reduce formal disputes, that same simplicity gets exploited. Managing both without penalising the vast majority of customers who have entirely legitimate reasons to return something requires a level of visibility and insight that most businesses currently cannot generate independently.”
The research suggests that the impact of dispute abuse on consumer pricing is likely to intensify as eCommerce volumes grow and alternative payment methods introduce new complexity. Merchants operating across multiple international markets, those accepting instalment payment options and businesses in high-risk verticals face compounding exposure that makes cost absorption increasingly difficult to sustain.
Most merchants lack the internal tools to fully understand where dispute costs originate or how they accumulate across the transaction lifecycle, a gap that makes early intervention effectively impossible without specialist support. Chargebacks911’s Unified Dispute Management System (UDMS) uses AI and machine learning to give merchants that visibility, identifying dispute cost drivers in real time and enabling earlier, more targeted action before losses reach the point where pricing becomes the only lever available. ResolveLab supports that process with continuous performance measurement, helping merchants track the full cost of dispute activity rather than managing individual cases in isolation.
“The merchants managing this most effectively treat dispute costs as a strategic business issue to overcome,” said Eaton. “Continuous measurement and real-time visibility into where losses are occurring is what allows businesses to act before costs accumulate to the point where passing them to customers feels like the only option. That is the outcome nobody wants, least of all honest consumers.”
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