A chargeback costs you far more than the dispute fee. Plug in your own numbers and see the true all-in cost — fee, reversed revenue, product already shipped, fulfillment, and staff time — per month and per year, plus your effective chargeback rate.
| Where the money goes (your inputs) | Per month |
|---|---|
| Dispute / chargeback fees All disputes × fee | $0 |
| Reversed revenue on lost disputes Lost disputes × disputed amount | $0 |
| Product cost written off (lost disputes) Lost disputes × amount × COGS% | $0 |
| Shipping & fulfillment sunk (lost disputes) Lost disputes × per-order fulfillment | $0 |
| Staff time handling disputes All disputes × minutes × loaded rate | $0 |
| Your estimated monthly chargeback cost | $0 |
When a customer disputes a charge, the card network pulls the money back — but you've usually already shipped the product and paid to fulfill it. On a losing dispute you're out the revenue, the goods, the shipping, and the non-refundable fee, plus the staff hour it took to respond. That's why the "true cost per chargeback" above runs well above the order value.
And it compounds: too many chargebacks pushes your effective chargeback rate up, and card networks put merchants above roughly the ~0.9%–1% mark into monitoring programs with higher fees and, eventually, the risk of losing card processing entirely.
A big share of "friendly fraud" and "item not received / not as described" disputes trace back to operational failures — an oversell you couldn't fulfill, an order stuck past SLA, a duplicate charge, a sync that quietly broke. Those are exactly the silent failures our Ops Monitor watches for. It connects to your Shopify and Stripe with read-only API keys and alerts you by email or Slack the moment one shows up — so you fix it before it becomes a dispute.
It is read-only: it never writes to your store and never moves money. It detects and alerts — it does not prevent chargebacks or guarantee any outcome. But if watching for silent failures heads off even a handful of disputes a month, that pays for the $149/month price several times over on the numbers above.
Start monitoring in minutes with read-only keys — $149/month, self-serve, cancel anytime.
Start monitoring — $149/mo →Not ready? Run the free, no-signup Ops Reliability Scorecard to see where your store is most exposed — or get a one-time $29 full audit of your store's ops health.