Navigating VAMP: How Riskified empowers Shopify merchants amidst payment disruptions

The ecommerce landscape is no stranger to change, but the recent wave of account terminations by Shopify Payments due to Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) compliance has left many ecommerce stores scrambling for answers, new payment solutions, and questioning how to safeguard their businesses from future risks.

At Riskified, we understand the challenges merchants face in mitigating fraudulent chargebacks in this evolving payments ecosystem. The VAMP-driven closures highlight a critical gap in the industry: merchants often lack the necessary tools, insights, and support to effectively navigate compliance requirements and mitigate risk. Let’s unpack the situation and explore how Riskified is uniquely positioned to help your shop.

What’s happening?

VAMP is designed to enforce stricter compliance standards on payment processors, particularly around chargeback thresholds and fraud prevention. Platforms like Shopify Payments, which operates as an acquirer, are directly subject to VAMP requirements and responsible for their entire merchant portfolio and must meet Visa’s thresholds or face penalties. This sometimes means taking swift action, such as closing accounts for many merchants.

Merchants impacted by these closures are left grappling with:

• Frozen payouts and disrupted cash flow.
• Uncertainty about what triggered the termination.
• Limited guidance on how to prevent future issues.

Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) threshold levels

Who is at risk?

Shopify or Shopify Plus merchants who rely heavily on card-not-present transactions, recurring billing, digital or intangible goods, or complex fulfillment and cross-border shipping are most exposed. These models naturally see higher dispute and fraud rates, and under the updated VAMP framework, those issues now count together toward a single threshold. The result: mid-market and enterprise Shopify merchants in these categories face a greater risk of being flagged or even shut down if chargeback and fraud ratios rise above Visa’s new limits.

The cost of non-compliance

For merchants, the consequences of non-compliance extend far beyond account closures. Even if a merchant doesn’t breach their own thresholds, they can still pose a risk to their payment service provider (PSP) due to portfolio-level compliance requirements. This disconnect underscores the need for merchants to adopt proactive risk management strategies to reduce fraudulent orders, especially when their acquirer has stringent guidelines. 

Moreover, many merchants are unaware of the importance of proper policies, checkout page optimization, and fraud prevention measures. Without these safeguards, even a thriving business can find itself labeled as “high-risk” and face operational disruptions.

How Riskified can protect your ecommerce store

Amidst this shake-up, merchants experiencing frequent chargebacks should implement Shopify fraud prevention tools immediately to avoid penalties or account termination. More generally, you need partners who provide education, proactive support, and scalable solutions. At Riskified, we’re committed to being that partner.

We believe that merchants shouldn’t have to choose between growth and compliance. Our solutions are designed to empower teams with the tools and insights they need to thrive in a complex payments landscape. 

Here’s how we can help:

• The scale and expertise to win against fraud: Riskified is the category-leader in using AI to fight ecommerce fraud. We work with the largest ecommerce brands in the world to fight fraud and policy abuse at scale, helping them win more customers, accept more orders online, and retain more revenue through loss prevention. 
• Proudly serving Shopify merchants: We’re proud to partner with hundreds of Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants to protect and grow their online businesses. Shopify merchants such as Simba Sleep, which we helped achieve a 99% approval rate while blocking 200 bps in fraud losses (read their story). Riskified is pre-integrated with Shopify Plus and is listed in the Shopify App Store, allowing for fast deployment.
• How our platform works: Our AI-driven platform provides real-time fraud detection and guarantees chargeback prevention, helping merchants stay within VAMP compliance thresholds while maximizing approvals. By leveraging AI to analyze transaction and behavioral data across hundreds of billions of GMV to patterns, we deliver guaranteed approve (or) decline decisions, enabling merchants to mitigate fraud risk before it becomes a problem.
• VAMP visibility and proactive dispute resolution: Under Visa’s updated VAMP rules, both fraud (TC40s) and dispute/chargeback events (TC15s) now count toward the same ratio, making early action critical. Ethoca Alerts provide merchants with near real-time notifications when a cardholder disputes or flags a transaction as fraudulent. By responding quickly to an Ethoca alert, such as refunding an order, pausing fulfillment, or contacting the customer, merchants can often prevent the issue before it becomes a chargeback, helping keep their VAMP ratio under control. Riskified integrates Ethoca Alerts directly into our Control Center dashboard to streamline merchants’ ability to take action to refund the customer during the grace period before a TC40 or TC15 is issued. Riskified has advanced chargeback representment capabilities that allow merchants to take full advantage of Compelling Evidence CE 3.0. When CE 3.0 is leveraged, you can exclude the TC40s that you successfully recover, which excludes them from the VAMP ratio.