Almost none of the several hundred pages of revisions in the 18 April 2026 Visa Core Rules change how a small merchant handles disputes. The main exception is Visa's monitoring program for payment companies (the Acquirer Monitoring Program). The merchant Excessive threshold (Visa's limit on how many of your sales can be disputed) dropped from 2.2% to 1.5%, effective 1 April 2026 across the US, Canada, the EU and Asia-Pacific. A merchant at a 1.8% dispute ratio now pays $8 per disputed or fraud sale.
The second change moves Compelling Evidence 3.0 (CE 3.0, Visa's rule that lets you use a customer's past orders as proof) into Order Insight, one of the alert services that let you refund before a chargeback is filed. CE 3.0 used to apply only after a dispute was filed, and only on Visa 10.4 fraud cases. From April, its past-order signal reaches the customer's bank while the customer is still asking questions. Merchants whose disputes are mostly 13.1 or 11.3 gain nothing.
See your dispute rate on each card network. Install Predispute free on Shopify.