Recover Lost Revenue: Why Payment Recovery is Essential

One answer lies in payment recovery—a critical function that optimizes transaction performance by detecting issues such as gateway outages and soft declines and responding in real time. Recover, as a process, plays a pivotal role in improving payment reliability, recovering lost revenue, and ultimately driving better payment outcomes for businesses of all sizes.

What is Payment Recovery?

The concept of recover refers to strategies and tools used to ensure that transactions are processed successfully even when challenges arise. Whether it's a hard outage from a primary gateway or soft declines due to temporary issues, recover ensures that businesses have the ability to retry and recover failed transactions with minimal disruption.

Recover enables businesses to:

• Mitigate the impact of outages with automatic failovers
• Retry failed transactions immediately through secondary gateways
• Utilize predefined retry codes or set custom rules to manage recovery efforts

By leveraging these strategies, businesses can automatically redirect transactions to secondary gateways when problems arise. For instance, if a soft decline occurs, a recover system can detect it, apply recovery rules, and attempt the transaction again using alternative payment routes.

Consider what one payments industry expert had to say about the recover process:

“Inside the industry, we talk about consistency in declines all the time. Success and uplift in authorization rates from changing PSPs is real, and it’s one of the quirks of the Visa and MasterCard networks we have to account for in our payments stack.”

In fact, data shows that, on average, 7.9% of failed transactions are successful when retried immediately through a secondary gateway. Moreover, businesses experience an average 0.76% increase in success rates when applying recovery strategies effectively.

Addressing Critical Payment Challenges with Recover

As the payments ecosystem continues to grow more complex, recover provides a powerful framework for improving two critical areas: connectivity and performance.

The concept of recover taps into the open payments infrastructure, allowing businesses to harness multiple connections and retry mechanisms to improve transaction success. Here’s how recover can address these challenges:

Hard Outages

One of the most significant issues businesses face is the hard outage—a complete failure of a primary payment gateway. Even when all systems are functioning smoothly on the business side, a gateway failure can stop payments in their tracks. In such cases, recover systems automatically route transactions through a secondary gateway, preventing revenue loss and ensuring continued service for customers.

The ability to retry transactions without manual intervention is a game-changer. The seconds saved by automatic retries can mean the difference between a seamless customer experience and a lost sale. In high-volume or customer-initiated transactions, even a brief outage can have a detrimental impact, making recover strategies essential for ensuring reliability in such scenarios.

Soft Outages

While hard outages are rare, soft outages are more common and often harder to detect. These occur when the primary gateway is still online, but a transaction fails due to issues such as:

• Blocked IP addresses
• Incorrect API credentials
• Expired certifications

Such issues often arise when businesses are experimenting with new gateways or configurations, and they can lead to failed transactions even when the gateway appears functional.

Recover strategies provide a fail-safe in these situations. By automatically retrying the transaction at another gateway, the system ensures a higher chance of success without disrupting the payment flow. This allows businesses to confidently experiment with new payment providers and technologies, knowing they can mitigate risks and recover potential losses from soft outages.

Businesses that Benefit from Recover

Many types of businesses can benefit from implementing recover strategies, particularly those that depend on high-volume transaction success, multiple payment gateways, or are expanding their global presence. Below are a few examples of industries that stand to gain the most from utilizing recover techniques:

• E-commerce Platforms: For businesses that rely on online sales, failed transactions can lead to abandoned carts and lost revenue.
• Subscription-based Services: In subscription models, recurring payments are crucial for maintaining consistent revenue.
• Travel and Hospitality: The travel industry often deals with high-value, time-sensitive payments for bookings. A failed transaction at checkout could mean a lost customer.
• Marketplaces and Aggregators: Marketplaces that connect buyers and sellers across different regions often manage payments from multiple gateways.
• Nonprofits and Fundraising Platforms: For nonprofits, every donation counts. Soft declines during the donation process could result in missed contributions.
• Global Enterprises: Businesses operating internationally often work with multiple payment processors to accommodate regional preferences.

By implementing recover as part of their payment strategy, these businesses can ensure higher transaction success rates, reduced revenue loss, and a better overall experience for their customers.

The Role of Open Payments in Recovery Strategies

At the core of the recover process is the concept of open payments—a framework that allows businesses to connect to multiple payment providers and gateways, enabling flexibility, choice, and redundancy. Open payments systems empower businesses to manage their payment flows more effectively, by ensuring that there are always alternative routes for transaction processing when needed.

In a closed system, merchants are often limited to a single gateway or provider, which increases the risk of failed transactions when issues arise. Open payments, by contrast, allow for a more resilient system where recovery processes can be implemented across multiple gateways and providers. The ability to choose from various options for primary and secondary gateways provides the flexibility needed to improve transaction success rates.