Before the holiday rush hits
Every holiday season, small businesses lose thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, in chargeback losses. They achieve record-breaking sales but have no protection in place when fraud hits.
Get a free chargeback risk assessment
Between November and January, ecommerce order volume spikes — and so does everything that follows it: fraud attempts, false claims, and chargebacks that land in your account weeks after the sale.
Here's the math most merchants don't do until it's too late:
One chargeback doesn't cost you the price of the order. It costs you the order, the merchandise, the shipping, the processing fee, and the hour someone spent trying to dispute it.
In 2025, chargebacks cost merchants about $5.75 for every $1 in disputed value. That marks a 45% cost increase from only three years ago.
Merchants see a 40–60% spike in disputes every January following the holiday shopping season, as post-holiday buyer's remorse and friendly fraud hit at scale. That means if chargebacks are a problem for you in October, they're going to be a much bigger problem in December.
"64% of consumers have filed a chargeback for a purchase they actually received."
Consumer study via PYMNTS.com, 2022
Chargebacks aren't one-size-fits-all. Each industry has its own fraud patterns, peak risk windows, and hidden costs. Here's what the data shows for businesses like yours.
Apparel is the most-targeted ecommerce category for return fraud and friendly fraud. Chargebacks in this category are most often filed as 'item not as described', frequently by buyers who wore or used the item and then disputed the purchase.
What you're losing?
An estimated 13.7% of apparel returns in 2023 were fraudulent, representing $101 billion in losses across the industry. Friendly fraud, or chargebacks filed on legitimate purchases, accounts for an estimated 70–80% of all disputes in this category.
What that means for your store?
If you're doing $500K in holiday sales and your chargeback rate hits 1%, you're looking at $5,000 in lost orders. That’s before fees, shipping losses, and labor. At a true cost multiplier of about $3.75 per dollar disputed, it’s closer to $18,750 in real damage.
