Chargebacks cost merchants and credit card companies tens of billions of dollars annually. As a result, credit card companies take various steps to prevent chargebacks, including penalizing merchants that have above-average chargeback rates.
But, the simple fact that a business has a high chargeback rate doesn’t necessarily mean that the business is doing anything wrong. Chargeback fraud (i.e., consumers claiming refunds for items they keep) is a major issue as well, and it is particularly prevalent in certain industries.
Even so, the credit card companies often take a one-size-fits-all approach to preventing chargebacks at the merchant level. If merchants’ chargebacks exceed a certain percentage of their total processed transactions, the credit card companies will label them as having “excessive chargebacks.” This label can have significant (and costly) consequences—and it can be difficult to remove.