The marketing language that triggers Stripe risk reviews

Why copy is screened at all

Stripe's risk models are trying to forecast one number: the rate at which your customers will dispute their charges. Sustained disputes above roughly 0.75% draw intervention, and the card networks' own monitoring programmes begin around 0.9%. Site copy is a cheap, early predictor of that number, readable before a single charge is processed, and the correlation is strong enough to act on.

That framing is what makes these patterns worth fixing even setting Stripe aside. Language that reliably produces disputes is producing them regardless of who is watching.

Outcome guarantees

Phrases the screen reads: "results guaranteed", "money back guarantee", "guaranteed or your money back", "100% guaranteed", "risk free", "no risk".

A guarantee is a promise a cardholder can hold you to, and disputes follow directly from it: a buyer who did not get the guaranteed outcome has a documented reason to file, and the reason code that results is one of the hardest to defend. Reviewers read this language as a forward indicator of the dispute rate rather than as a compliance breach in itself.

What to write instead. Describe the actual terms. "30-day refund, no questions asked" is a stronger sales claim than "100% guaranteed", and it is one you can evidence when a dispute arrives. If you do offer a guarantee, publish exactly what qualifies and honour it faster than the dispute window.

Miracle / medical claims

Phrases the screen reads: "miracle cure", "clinically proven", "cures", "melts fat", "reverses aging", "detoxifies".

Health claims attract regulators as well as processors. In most markets, claiming a product treats, cures or prevents a condition makes it a medicine in law regardless of what it contains, which puts the account in a licensed category it has not been approved for. The same wording also pulls supplement and cosmetic businesses out of their own restricted category and into a prohibited-adjacent read.

What to write instead. Stick to substantiated, non-therapeutic descriptions of what the product does. Where a claim is genuinely supported, cite the study on the page. A linked source moves a claim out of the pattern the screen is looking for.

Pressure tactics

Phrases the screen reads: "act now", "limited time offer", "only a few left", "won't last", "today only".

Urgency mechanics correlate strongly with buyer's remorse, and buyer's remorse is a dispute. False scarcity, such as a countdown that resets or stock counters that never move, is separately treated as a deceptive practice by consumer regulators in several markets, so it carries risk beyond the dispute rate.

What to write instead. Keep urgency only where it is true. A real deadline, a genuine stock limit and a dated sale are all fine; the problem is manufactured scarcity, and a screen cannot tell them apart without checking whether the countdown resets.

Trial-to-subscription traps

Phrases the screen reads: "free trial", "just pay shipping", "automatically enrolled", "cancel anytime*".

This is the highest-dispute pattern on the list and the one most likely to escalate on its own. Negative-option billing is separately regulated: the FTC's rules in the US, and equivalents elsewhere, set explicit disclosure, consent and cancellation requirements. It is also a restricted category on Stripe in its own right. Charges a customer does not recognise become fraud-coded disputes, which are the ones that damage an account fastest.

What to write instead. Meet the negative-option requirements rather than avoiding the words: state the price and date of the first full charge next to the consent, send a reminder before it lands, and make cancellation as easy as signup. See the restricted-category page for the full requirements.

Unrealistic income claims

Phrases the screen reads: "passive income guaranteed", "double your money", "financial freedom in", "earn from home guaranteed".

Income claims put a business into the deceptive-schemes read even where the product is a legitimate course or coaching programme. As with outcome guarantees, the claim itself creates the dispute: a buyer who did not reach the promised figure has a straightforward case, and these disputes arrive in clusters when a cohort finishes together.

What to write instead. Sell the curriculum, not the outcome. Describe what is taught, what is delivered and what support is included. Where you use testimonials, drop the revenue screenshots. They carry most of the classification weight and none of the legal protection.

What the screen reads beyond your product pages

Everything publicly reachable is treated as your site: subdomains, staging environments that were never locked down, PDFs, blog archives and the destinations of outbound affiliate links. Copy you retired from the homepage two years ago still counts if the page is still served.

Alongside these patterns, screening also matches business-category vocabulary, the restricted categories, which are supportable once their conditions are met, and the prohibited categories, which are not supportable at all. Language issues weigh into reviews; category matches start them.

The missing pages that matter as much as the wording

Reviews weigh absences as well as content. The pages a reviewer expects to find, and flags when missing, are a refund and cancellation policy, terms of service, a working contact route with a real address, delivery or fulfilment timescales, and, for subscriptions, the billing terms stated where the customer consents rather than buried in a linked document.