A chargeback is a refund you did not agree to, plus a fee, plus a mark against your account. Coaching gets more of them than almost any other business. GivePayments, a processor that works with high-ticket coaching, describes coaching as running one of the highest chargeback rates of any vertical, around 1%. Sift's benchmark for all industries in Q3 2025 was 0.26%, up from 0.21% a year earlier, and even education and training, the highest-rate vertical in that data, sits at 1.02%.
Where do the card networks draw the line?
| Network | Program | Threshold | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visa | Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) | 1.5% ratio from April 2026, down from 2.2% | Per-dispute fees, monthly fines, possible termination |
| Mastercard | Excessive Chargeback Merchant (ECM) | 1.5% and 100 or more chargebacks in a month | Fees and remediation; escalates at 3% and 300 |
| Both | MATCH list | Termination for excessive disputes | Difficult to get a new merchant account for five years |
Visa's ratio counts fraud reports and disputes together against settled transactions, so a coaching business with a few hundred transactions a month does not have much room. Ten disputes in a month on 700 transactions is 1.4%.
Why is coaching so high?
- Large single charges. A $5,000 dispute is worth the cardholder's time in a way a $50 one is not.
- Digital delivery. Issuers lean toward the cardholder on 'did not receive value' claims for products with nothing to ship back.
- Slow refund handling. A client who waits ten days for a reply calls the bank on day eleven.
- Sales pressure. A close that leaned on urgency produces a buyer who feels tricked the morning after.
- Recurring billing without warning. An instalment or renewal that hits with no reminder is disputed as unrecognised.
- Unclear descriptors. If the statement says a holding company name, the client does not know what they are looking at.
What does a chargeback actually cost?
The refunded amount, a dispute fee from the processor, the original processing fee which is usually not returned, staff time to gather evidence and respond, and the ratio. For a $5,000 program that is easily $5,200 out and a day of somebody's time, with a low chance of winning the dispute. A refund handled in a week would have cost $5,000 and kept the account clean.
How do you keep the rate under 0.5%?
- Run a written refund process with a seven-day close. Most chargebacks are refund requests that stalled.
- Send a reminder three days before every instalment and every renewal, from a person, saying what the charge is for.
- Set the statement descriptor to the program name the client knows.
- Record the kickoff call and keep attendance, module completion and message logs. That is your evidence if a dispute comes anyway.
- Put the refund policy in the checkout and the welcome email, and get a checkbox on it.
- Watch the health score. A client with no attendance and a failed payment is a dispute in waiting; contact them before the bank does.
- Do not fight every dispute. Contest the ones where you have a participation record. Refund the rest fast and log why.
The connection to retention
A chargeback is the last stage of the drift pattern. The client stopped attending, stopped posting, stopped replying, saw a charge, and picked up the phone. Every step of that was visible in the data weeks earlier. A client success team that flags at-risk clients and runs the refund process is also the chargeback prevention program, which is why the businesses we run treat disputes as a client success metric rather than a finance one.
