Reduce declines
Win back the payments your processor turns down.
A declined card is often a good customer on the wrong processor at the wrong moment. Retry it somewhere else, keep stored cards current, and route each card where it gets approved.
- $84.00Issuer unavailableStripeWorldpay
- €129.00Processor timeoutWorldpayAuthorize.net
- $42.50Do not honorAuthorize.netStripe
- $310.00Stolen cardStripeHard decline, not retried
Anatomy of a decline
Not every no means no.
A processor returns three kinds of failure. Each one gets a different answer, matched by exact error code first, then by type.
Soft decline
Retry elsewhere- Issuer unavailable
- Do not honor
- Try again later
The payment cascades to the next processor in your routing graph, on the same card, inside the same checkout.
Outage
Fail over- Processor timeout
- Gateway error
- Connection refused
The processor is down, not the card. The payment moves to a processor that is up, and the customer never sees the failure.
Hard decline
Stop- Stolen or lost card
- Closed account
- Invalid card number
Route these to stop. Retrying them is what card network retry rules penalise, so the payment ends here and the customer is asked for another card.
The levers
Six products, each aimed at a different reason a card is refused.
Smart Routing
Route each card by country, BIN, currency or amount to the processor that approves it most often, and cascade soft declines and outages to the next one.
Network Tokens
Charge stored cards with Visa and Mastercard tokens that stay valid when the card is reissued, instead of a number the issuer may no longer recognise.
Card Account Updater
Pick up new numbers and expiry dates for reissued cards before the next charge, so it is not declined for an expired card.
3D Secure
Authenticate the payments an issuer would otherwise refuse, and require it only where your rules say it pays off.
Apple Pay & Google Pay
Wallet payments carry a device cryptogram and an authenticated customer, the kind of payment issuers approve readily.
Card Attributes
Know a card's brand, type, issuer and country before you route it, so a rule can send it where cards like it go through.
How it works
Recovering declines in three steps.
Connect a second processor
Keep the processor you have. Add one more, or open one through the Acquirer Network, so a decline has somewhere else to go.
Draw the failure paths
In the routing builder, send soft declines and outages to the next processor and leave hard declines alone.
Keep stored cards current
Turn on network tokens and account updater for the cards in your vault, so renewals do not fail on stale details.
Works with
Questions teams ask before they switch.
Soft declines and processor outages. A soft decline is a temporary refusal, such as an issuer that is unavailable or a processor error, and the same card often goes through on another processor. Hard declines, such as a stolen card or a closed account, should not be retried, so route them to stop rather than to another processor.
Send us your declines. We will show you what comes back.
Tell us which processors you use and what your decline codes look like. We will map which of them a second processor, a token or a retry rule can recover.
- Keep your current processor
- Soft declines retried, hard declines left alone
- A transparent number before you sign anything