How to improve payment gateway transaction success rate

Transaction success rate for a payment gateway is critically important, and there are various ways to improve. The best option is to analyze your payment gateway and identify where the transaction is dropping.

In this blog I am trying to present some techniques to improve success rate, and all of these techniques are applicable to almost all payment gateways. Here is the list:

1. Payment gateway integration: All merchants do not have skilled technical team to integrate with payment gateways. Payment gateways can do the following things to smooth the integration process.
   
   a) Simplify integration: This can be done by providing proper documentation, simple use cases, examples, sample codes in different technologies, avoid any complex integration steps be completed by merchant.
   b) Integration API's: A payment gateway can provide integration API's for different technologies/programming languages and common eCommerce platforms. Merchant should be able to paste the API's and get started.
   c) Integration testing: If something is not tested, it will fail. Each merchant should perform testing of integration by going through a UAT, which payment gateway should provide. The UAT should be comprehensive by having all the different possible cases of handling approval and failure.
   d) Integration support team: A payment gateway should have a team of skilled professionals to support merchants integrate.
   
   Here is another post of mine about how to do better integrations for best success rate.
   
   
2. Improper validations: For security reasons there are validations at various steps. If validations are not proper then at any step a valid transaction can be flagged as invalid, and hence will be dropped. Here are some important points in this regard.
   a) Merchants should test all validations when they get postback from payment gateway after a transaction is completed.
   b) If a merchant posts an invalid but optional field to payment gateway. Payment gateway should not reject the transaction. Since the field is optional a payment gateway can try to normalize the value.
   c) Send email to merchant for each invalid transaction, send proper logs in the log system to later see and improve.
   d) Less is the number of mandatory fields, the better it is.
   
   
3. Smart Payment Page: Payment page is the page which collects card details from buyer. There are various features of a smart payment page. Lighter is the page, fast it will load, more mobile friendly it will be. It will reduce refresh of payment page by user. Internet infrastructure in India is not very sound, and a lighter page in this case will win. Here is more about a smart payment page - Smart Payment Page
   
   
4. One click checkout: Different payment gateways call this feature differently. It allows the buyer to save card details on payment gateway and all subsequent transactions only require the buyer to enter CVV. It will speed up the checkout process and will result in better success rate and user experience
   
   
5. Intelligent routing: Payment gateways usually integrate with many payment acquirers/processors. Each acquirer serves some services better than others. Here are some examples:
   a) It can improve success rate by providing more number of methods of payments (card types, etc).
   b) A transaction failed on one acquirer may pass on another.
   c) If one acquire is down for some reasons, other acquirer will still be able to process transaction.
   d) International transactions, dynamic currency conversion, tokenization, 3DS authentication and other such services are not supported by all acquirers
   
   
6. Segregation of 3DS process (MPI) from authorization: MPI is responsible for cardholder authentication using 3DS. It is technically possible to segregate this service from authorization service. It will allow flexibility and control in intelligent routing of transaction. All acquirers in India may not support this feature
   
   
7. Handling a failed transaction: If a transaction failed with one card (method of payment) the payment gateway should prompt the user to use some other card (or a different method of payment) and complete the transaction. If the transaction failed for some internal technical reason with one acquirer, payment gateway may try to complete the transaction with some other acquirer
   
   
8. Number of methods of payments: More is the number of methods of payment, more are the options available for the buyer to use, more are the chances of transaction to success. It will also give more flexibility and control to intelligent routing
   
   
9. Reduce transaction time: Scalability of payment gateway is very important, it should be an enterprise solution with minimum latency, even under load. The time window after starting a transaction and its completion should be minimum
   
   
10. False positive: Some times the fraud and risk prevention system can flag a valid and authentic transaction. It is known as a false positive. You need to do proper analytics and checks that it should not happen
    
    
11. Status inquiry: Some times it happens that the transaction is successful, amount is deducted from buyers account but merchant does not get confirmation about it. A status inquiry web service from payment gateway can allow the merchants to detect such cases. Notifications can also be provided by payment gateway to handle this case. In order to complete the process the right way, the payment gateway should also be consuming such status inquiry service from acquirers, mainly for net-banking transactions
    
    
12. Redirects and forwards: Avoid internal (and sometimes external) forwards and redirects. Try to achieve the same via a server to server call or with some other alternates. Less is the number of clicks/steps/legs/time/forwards/redirects/internal errors, more will be the success rate.

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