Card Declines at Checkout

The loss you never see

An abandoned basket at least leaves a trace you can count.

A declined card leaves a customer who tried to pay, could not, and left, and on most small shops nobody looks at that anywhere.

Some of those declines are the bank protecting somebody, which is correct and not your problem.

A meaningful share are caused by your own configuration, and those are recoverable at no cost once you know they are happening.

Find the report

Every payment provider has one and almost nobody has opened it.

It lists attempted payments that failed, with a reason code and a description for each.

Look at a month, count them against successful orders, and note the reasons in order of frequency.

That ratio is the number to watch, and the first time anybody looks it is usually higher than expected.

The reasons are what tell you whether this is the banks or you.

The reasons and what they mean

• Insufficient funds: theirs, retryable later.
• Address mismatch: frequently your settings.
• Expired card: recoverable with a prompt.
• Issuer declined: a bank rule, often retryable.
• Do not honour: vague, usually retryable.
• Stolen or lost: correct, leave it.

The second is the one worth attention. A strict address check rejects legitimate customers whose bank record does not match what they typed, which is common with postal codes, apartment numbers, and anybody who has moved recently.

Check your own strictness

Since the settings that reduce fraud also reject real customers.

Most providers let you decide what to do when the address or security code does not match, and the strictest option is not the default best choice.

Rejecting every address mismatch removes some fraud and a larger number of genuine orders, particularly from older customers and from anybody using a card registered elsewhere.

A middle setting, accepting a partial match while flagging it for review, is usually the right balance for a small shop.

Look at what yours is set to, since it was chosen once, possibly by somebody else, and never revisited.

Then change one thing and watch both the declines and the fraud, rather than assuming.

A worked example

A shop opened their decline report for the first time and found roughly one attempted payment in nine failing.

Most of those were address mismatches, and the account had been set to reject any mismatch at all.

They relaxed it to accept a postal code match without a street match, and to flag rather than reject partial matches.

Declines fell by more than half over the following month, and successful orders rose correspondingly.

Two flagged orders turned out to be worth checking, which took a few minutes each.

The setting had been costing them orders quietly for three years.

Tell the customer something useful

Since the message at the moment of failure decides whether they try again.

The default message is frequently a generic payment failed, which tells somebody nothing and reads as an error on your side.

Say what to check, plainly: the card number, the expiry, and that the billing address matches the card exactly.

Offer an alternative payment method in the same message, since a second route recovers a proportion immediately.

And keep whatever they entered so a retry is one field rather than the whole form again.

Never say the card was declined by their bank in a way that sounds like an accusation, since a substantial number of these are recoverable and the customer is not at fault.

Recover the ones you can

Which requires having captured something to recover with.

Where the email address was entered before payment, a failed payment can be followed up, and that message converts well because the person had already decided to buy.

Send it promptly, within an hour or two, saying the payment did not go through and offering a link to try again.

Keep it brief and non-accusatory, since the customer may not know it failed at all if they closed the page.

That is one automated message and it is among the highest-return things a small shop can set up.

Ask for the email early in the checkout rather than last, which is what makes this possible at all.

Watch it during the busy period

Because decline rates move in December and the causes are seasonal.

Card limits are reached more often, banks flag unusual spending more aggressively, and people use cards they do not normally use.

A rise in declines in early December is normal and worth distinguishing from a rise caused by something you changed.

Check the report weekly during the peak rather than monthly, since a configuration problem introduced in November is expensive if it runs until January.

Note the figure now, before the season, so you have a baseline to compare against.

Check the checkout works everywhere

Since a proportion of what looks like declines is not a bank decision at all.

A payment can fail before it reaches the card network: a script blocked by a browser, an extra verification step that will not load, or a form that behaves differently on an older phone.

Those appear as failed or incomplete attempts and have nothing to do with the customer's card.

Test your own checkout on a phone, on a different browser, and with a card registered to a different address, which covers most of the ways it silently breaks.

Do it after any change to the site, since a checkout that worked in October is not guaranteed to work after a plugin update in November.

The counter-case

Some declines should stay.

Relaxing checks increases fraud, and the cost of a fraudulent order is the goods plus the chargeback fee plus the loss of the sale, which is considerably more than a declined order costs.

High-value orders in particular justify strictness, and a shop selling easily resold goods has a different calculation from one selling something specific.

And a large share of declines are genuinely the customer's bank making a correct decision that you cannot influence.

Open the report, fix the settings causing avoidable declines, and improve the message and the follow-up.

What to do

1. Open the decline report for a month.
2. Count declines against successful orders.
3. List the reasons by frequency.
4. Check your address-match setting.
5. Improve the failure message.
6. Ask for the email early in checkout.
7. Follow up failures within two hours.

Step four is where the recoverable losses usually are, since a setting chosen once and never revisited rejects real customers alongside the fraud it was meant to stop.

The costs shown earlier in the process are covered in showing shipping cost before checkout.

Frequently asked questions

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