Card disputes over orders that never arrived and subscriptions that shoppers believed they had canceled rose from 13.0% to 24.1% of contested chargebacks in a year, while fraud claims fell to a two-year low, according to a benchmark report released Oct. 27 by Justt, a chargeback management platform for merchants.

The report, titled “The Fraud to Service Shuffle: The 2026 Chargeback Benchmark Report,” is based on contested chargebacks processed through Justt’s platform from July 2024 to June 2026 across seven industries, the company said. Trend figures are checked against a fixed group of 165 merchants active in both comparison periods. Justt said the data reflect real dispute outcomes rather than survey answers; the report does not name processors, card issuers or card networks, and it does not disclose absolute win rates or volumes.

By the report’s breakdown, “product not received” disputes rose from 7.1% to 13.3% of chargebacks, and disputes tied to canceled subscriptions rose from 5.9% to 10.8%. Fraud’s share fell from 74.6% to 60.4% between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026. The median merchant handled 13% more contested chargebacks than a year earlier, and one in four saw volumes rise 68% or more.

The report also found wide gaps in outcomes. For the same claim type in the same quarter, fraud chargeback win rates varied by more than 30 percentage points between payment processors and by more than 35 points between major US card issuers, according to the release. Merchants won fraud disputes roughly twice as often on one of the two largest card networks as on the other. The UK and Ireland was the only major region where service disputes outnumbered fraud claims, which the release said is consistent with Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) shifting fraud liability to card issuers.

“Cardholders increasingly treat disputes as a customer service channel,” said Ofir Tahor, Justt’s chief executive and co-founder. He added that merchants relying on a fraud-focused playbook are at a disadvantage. The release cited a forecast from Datos Insights and Mastercard of more than 281 million card chargebacks in 2026.

Card networks are adjusting their dispute rules as well. Mastercard announced this month that it is expanding its First-Party Trust program, which targets first-party or “friendly” fraud, in which a cardholder disputes a legitimate purchase either intentionally or because they do not recognize the charge, according to reports by Financial IT and The Paypers. The program launched in 2024 in the US, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia Pacific. It becomes available in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa in October 2026 and across Europe in July 2027.

Under the program, merchants, including small businesses, can share purchase, delivery and authentication information with card issuers, either within the transaction or during the dispute process. Authorization insights powered by Mastercard’s fraud models give issuers signals that point to likely third-party fraud and flag the highest-trust transactions. Mastercard has also introduced rules that define compelling evidence for disputed purchases, and it offers merchant chargeback protection for disputes that meet the program’s evidence-sharing requirements, the reports said.

Mastercard cited a forecast that global chargeback volume will reach 324 million transactions in 2028, up from a forecast of 261 million in 2025. “As digital commerce continues to grow, building trust across the ecosystem has never been more important,” Michele Centemero, executive vice president of services for Europe at Mastercard, said, as quoted by Financial IT.

Why it matters

Both sets of findings point the same way: a growing share of disputes turn on what happened after a sale, such as delivery or a cancellation, rather than on whether the cardholder made the purchase at all. For merchants, that puts more weight on information about delivery, cancellations and authentication, which are the categories of evidence Mastercard’s program asks merchants to share.

The Justt data also indicate that dispute outcomes depend heavily on which processor, issuer and network a case passes through. Because the report does not name those companies or publish absolute win rates, it cannot be used to compare specific providers.

What to watch

Mastercard’s program reaches Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa this month and the rest of Europe in July 2027. Justt’s figures run through June 2026, so they do not yet reflect any effect of the program’s expansion in those regions.

The caveats

Justt sells chargeback management services, and its figures come from disputes contested on its own platform, which may not represent all merchants. The report gives shares and growth rates, not absolute volumes. The chargeback forecasts cited by both companies were produced or commissioned by industry participants; The Paypers identified Mastercard’s 2028 figure as coming from a Mastercard-commissioned report. Details of Mastercard’s program are as reported by Financial IT and The Paypers, whose reports carry dates of Oct. 22 and Oct. 27.