Payment Acceptance is reffered to as the percentage of payment attempts that are successfully completed. It is an crucial metric for all Merchants, as the Payment Service Provider or Acquirer can be the reason for lost orders. We work every day to increase the Payment Acceptance on the IPP platform, but what can you do to increase it, if you are not using IPP yet.
8 out of 9 merchants do not know, how to control the Payment Acceptance of their Payment Service Provider and/or Acquirer.
Payment Acceptance explained
There are many different definitions of the Payment Acceptance. Some define it as the authorisation rate and others define it as the decline rate. However the most correct definition of Payment Acceptance is the proportion of successful attempts. This is ususally calculated as a percentage.
If it should be explained in an formular the form is the following:
Payment acceptance = (no. of successful payments/no. of payment attempts) x 100
Why payment acceptance is a useful metric
Our most important job as Payment Infrastructure is to calculate and analyze the payment flow. Within this flow, identify the payment acceptance, and take the required actions to optimise the payment flow for the future.
In cases where an payment acceptance rate is low, our payment service provider and merchants is loosing transactions and revenue, both from a prospective customer and from an already existing customre who want to continue with the next purchase of goods or services.
When we are analysing payments, we segment them and analyze how and why payments fail, including what mitigation we need.
Below is some of the ways you can do it:
- Some Payment Methods have higher acceptance rate. Does the payment acceptance rate increase or decrease based on the payment method used?
For example if a wallet is used instead of card payments. - The Billing cycle is important. We have identified decline rates increase when the transactions is processed more rarely.
- Is it the Payment type that is the reason? The decline rate can increase and decrease based on online checkouts versus subscriptions
- Is it the Payment Scheme that is the reason? We have seen cases where specific payment schemes decline transactions, while other schemes do not. In that case, it can be relevant to validate the scheme setup is correct and the right MCC is set on the agreement.
- Is it a specific type of Customer? Some merchants experience higher decline rates from some countries, and some see it based on certain demographics.
By doing this segmentation of the Payments, you can fast and easily validate the payment acceptance in each segment. When you have identified the segment with issues, you can mitigate it and prevent it from occouring.
When you work with first time users, improving the payment acceptance rate means you increase your gain of new customers. With existing users, you can prevent loosing a customer and prevent loosing profit through what is an already known customer. This means the decrease of the involuntary churn: The customer wanted to purchase, but could not get through your flow. In the end, optimising payment acceptance means more customers, more reliable customers, higher profits and better customer rention.
Payment acceptance as SaaS
Many SaaS companies see lower payment acceptance rates, than eCommerce stores. There are actually several reasons for this.
First, the payment acceptance and optimizations for online transactions, is far more difficult and tends to be far lower than in-person purchases.
The second reason is most SaaS company work globally, and this respond with issues on international payments which can crop up. Saas is often a subscription-based business model, which leads to customers have to consistently have their card information updated for the subscription to be deducted and go through.
Here comes the quality of having control of the segmentation. Any SaaS company can optimize their flow, and IPP offer some services to identify if a payment card have been disabled – before trying to perform the Authorization request.
Solutions for a higher Payment Acceptance
There is a lot of things you can do, to gain a better acceptance rate.
Firstly, reach out to your Payment Service Provider and get a copy of the statistics. With the statistics you can qualify what the reason for the failing payments is.
Secondary, ensure to use the Card Validation methods, as you through these, can ensure the card is still valid, before trying to process a payment that might fail. Failing payments is problematic for your acceptance rate. These few things can lead, on average, to a recovery of more than 75% of all failed payments.
We do help
IPP helps you on a daily basis, by identifying problematic payments, and behind the scene perform mitigating actions on your behalf.
If you are not yet a customer of IPP, reach out to our team and let our team analyze your current payment flows – to see if we can help you increase your revenue.
