Payment acceptance rate
What is it and why is it important?
When your customers attempt to pay, Airwallex typically sends the payment to payment providers, such as card issuers (e.g. Visa, Mastercard) or local payment methods (e.g. Alipay, WechatPay). For card issuers, the payment is forwarded to the issuing bank, who then chooses to accept or decline the payment, while for local payment methods, it could be the payment providers who make the decision themselves.
The payment acceptance rate is a measure of how many payment attempts are successfully accepted by payment providers. It is often used to monitor the health of your payments and to compare how acquirers are performing relative to each other.
On Airwallex’s web app, you can find your payment acceptance rate summary on the Payments dashboard and a more detailed analysis on the Payment Analytics tab within the Payment Activity section.
By default, Airwallex displays a payment acceptance rate that is calculated at an order level for you to understand what percentage of orders have been successfully paid. To help you focus on understanding your acquirer performance, we exclude risk engine blocks, authentication failures, and insufficient funds declines by default, but you could choose to include them in the analysis if you so prefer.
How is your payment acceptance rate calculated?
The payment acceptance rate is calculated as the number of payment attempts accepted by payment providers divided by the number of attempts submitted to payment providers. Some payment attempts are related to a single order, for example, your customer could retry a failed card payment with another card or local payment method multiple times. Airwallex removes these repeated attempts to calculate your acceptance at an order level by default.
Airwallex also excludes 0 value authorisations used for card validations and factors that occur before the submission to payment providers by default, such as invalid attempts, attempts blocked by risk engine, and authentication failures. In addition, Airwallex also excludes payments declined due to insufficient funds by default as those declines are not addressable by Airwallex.
Please consult the following example for how the acceptance rate is calculated by default:
| Payment attempts via Airwallex | Count |
|---|---|
| Total payment attempts | 100,000 |
| Invalid attempts | - 500 |
| Duplicate payment attempts | - 5,000 |
| Blocked by risk engine | - 1,000 |
| Proceeded for authentication | = 93,500 |
| Failed authentication | - 1,000 |
| Submitted to payment provider | = 92,500 |
| Declined by payment provider due to insufficient funds | - 500 |
| Submitted to payment provider, excluding declines due to insufficient funds | = 92,000 |
| Declined by payment provider due to reasons apart from insufficient funds | - 5,000 |
| Accepted payments | = 87,000 |
| Payment acceptance rate | 94.6% = (87,000/92,000) |
Why do payment provider declines happen and what can I do about it?
Declines can happen for a wide variety of reasons, from users not having sufficient funds to pay or due to fraud prevention measures. In the payment analytics page, Airwallex categorises the provider decline reasons in a chart and provides a recommendation about what you can do for each decline category. The most common reasons for provider declines are insufficient funds/over credit limit, suspected fraud, the card / account is not allowed for the transaction.
On the transaction level, Airwallex passes on the original response codes that we receive from payment providers. You are able to view the payment providers' original response codes within each payment in the web app to understand why they have declined the transaction.
How does Airwallex identify an order and remove duplicate attempts?
To identify duplicate attempts occurring close together in time and group them into a single unique attempt for an order, Airwallex employs the following logic:
- Attempts with the same order id, or
- Attempts with the same (customer ID or customer email or customer phone number or device ID or card fingerprint) and original payment currency and amount
For example, the following are considered to be a single unique attempt each:
- 3 attempts (2 failed and 1 succeeded) with the same order ID occurring within 24 hours
- 4 attempts (3 failed and 1 succeeded) with different order IDs but with the same customer email, original payment currency and amount occurring within 24 hours
How could you customise your payment acceptance analysis?
Should you wish to customise your analysis to include some of the factors excluded by default, you could uncheck filters under “Include in analysis” to get an unfiltered view of your acceptance rate.
The filters at the top of the Payment Analytics tab apply to all metrics, charts and tables in the report. Use the “Payment Method”, “Card Issuing Country” filters to analyse how acceptance rates might differ by payment method or card issuing country. Do note that the “Card Issuing Country” filter will only filter payments done via cards.
If no specific currency is selected in the “Payment Currency” filter, we sum up the volumes across all your payment currencies and convert them to your default settlement currency.
Do note that the charts are displayed according to the timezone based on the location you have signed up in.
What could you do to improve payment acceptance?
To improve your payment acceptance, you should consider the following:
- Enable the most popular local payment methods for your customers’ locations. Cards are often not the predominant payment method in many countries and you could be losing out on sales if your customers are not able to pay in payment methods that they are used to. To enable more payment methods, navigate to the Payment Methods tab within the Payments section and apply for more payment methods
- Display prices in your customers’ local currencies. To offer local payment methods to your customers, you would typically need to submit payments in a limited set of currencies that are supported by the payment method. For merchants on hosted payment pages, payment links and Shopify, Airwallex could help you convert your prices to customers’ local currencies upon checkout via the Automatic Currency Conversion feature so that you can offer local payment methods
- Provide one-click checkout payment methods, such as ApplePay and GooglePay. You can expect an increase in your payment acceptance rate by offering one-click checkout options to your card users as it would save them the hassle of having to enter their card details to complete the payment and reduce the likelihood of them failing to complete the payment. To enable them, navigate to the Payment Methods tab within the Payments section and apply for ApplePay and GooglePay there
- Tailor your checkout experience. If you have built your own checkout experience, you should analyse the decline reasons and identify areas of opportunity where you could guide your users to reduce declines. For example, if you see significant volumes of incorrect card number failures, you could ensure that customers enter only card numbers validated by the Luhn algorithm for schemes that support it and conform to scheme guidelines on number length and combinations