Refund and Chargeback Cost Calculator

A good sale earns sixty-five. A disputed one loses eighty.

So the distance between the two outcomes is a hundred and forty-five, and one chargeback undoes two and a quarter good sales.

A chargeback is not a refund, and treating them as the same line in a spreadsheet understates one of them badly. On a refund the goods come back and you are out the shipping and the handling. On a chargeback the money is taken, the goods are gone, the shipping out was already spent, and the processor charges a fee for the privilege of losing the argument.

The swing is the number that matters rather than the loss, because a sale that sticks earns you something and a disputed one costs you something — so the gap between them is both figures added together. That is why one chargeback undoes more than one sale, and usually more than two.

The second half of the page is the part that keeps people awake: how much room is left before your processor’s monitoring threshold.

That threshold is an input, and you should go and check your own. Card scheme monitoring programmes change, differ between the schemes and differ by region, so a figure printed into a page written once is a figure that goes quietly out of date and then gets quoted with confidence. The page asks you for yours instead of pretending to know it.

There are two ways to get under a threshold and the page prices one of them. Fewer disputes, or more orders — the same count of disputes is a smaller share of a bigger book, and that route is pure arithmetic. Whether it is the right thing to do is not, and growing a business in order to dilute a dispute rate is a plan with an obvious flaw in it.

It gives no advice on fighting individual disputes and quotes no win rate for doing so, because those figures vary by reason code, by scheme and by how good your evidence is, and no page can know any of that about your business.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Dispute rates differ enormously between channels, and a blended figure describes none of them.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.