8 Strategies to Improve Payment Success Rates and Recapture Lost Revenue

Keep Revenue Flowing and Customers Content With These Strategies

Payment failures are more common than businesses realise, leading to lost revenue and eroding customer trust. Every declined card, outdated detail or technical error means missed opportunities.

This guide presents nine proven strategies to increase payment success, reduce revenue loss and strengthen customer retention. From optimising checkout flows to smart payment routing, these tactics help you close more sales and grow with confidence.

1. Offer Multiple Payment Options

Shoppers expect choice at checkout, and payment preferences vary by region:

• North America: Credit cards 
• Singapore: PayNow and GrabPay are widely used
• Israel: Bit and Paybox are popular local options
• Europe: Bank transfers and direct debits remain common

To improve payment success, offer a mix of:

• Credit and debit cards
• Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay)
• Buy Now, Pay Later options
• Local methods relevant to your markets

Balance variety with simplicity: display clear logos, remember returning customers’ preferences, minimise data entry and allow payment method changes during checkout to reduce abandonment and boost conversions.

2. Simplify the Checkout Process

A simple, well-organised checkout reduces abandonment and boosts payment success. Whether one-page or multi-step, use clear progress indicators. ASOS saw a 50% drop in cart abandonment after implementing a clean, mobile-optimised checkout.

Offer guest checkout to avoid losing customers forced to create accounts, with optional account creation after purchase.

To improve checkout:

• Minimise form fields
• Add real-time error checks
• Speed up loading times
• Design for mobile with touch-friendly buttons, simplified fields and thumb-friendly layouts

Balance security and usability by using 3D Secure thoughtfully, clearly explaining verification steps and displaying trust signals like SSL badges.

Focus on simplicity, guest access, mobile optimisation and clear security to keep customers moving toward purchase.

3. Utilise Automatic Retry Mechanisms

Automatic retry systems recover failed payments without customer intervention, reducing revenue loss, especially important for subscription businesses.

Smart practices include:

• Spaced retries: Gradually increase intervals between attempts with slight variation to avoid overload.
• Avoid duplicates: Ensure transactions aren’t processed multiple times.
• Tailor retries: Match retry timing to error types, such as retrying insufficient funds around payday.
• Set limits: Cap retries at 4–5 attempts to conserve resources.
• Combine with outreach: Send customer notifications after multiple failures to update payment details.

These tactics reduce involuntary churn, recover lost revenue and improve payment success rates while maintaining customer trust.

4. Keep Payment Information Up to Date

Expired cards and outdated billing details cause many payment failures. Account updater services automatically refresh stored credentials, update expired cards, and notify you of closed or reissued accounts.

Proactively remind customers 30 days before their card expiry to update their details and avoid disruptions.

Make updating easy by:

• Offering a simple customer portal for payment management
• Including one-click update links in emails
• Using in-app prompts for soon-to-expire cards

Combining automation with timely communication reduces failed payments and improves customer experience.

5. Strengthen Fraud Prevention Measures

Balancing security and user experience is vital. Up to 70% of declined transactions are false positives, causing estimated losses of $443 billion, far exceeding actual fraud losses.

Use risk-based authentication to apply strong verification only when necessary, reducing friction for legitimate customers. Incorporate behavioural biometrics and device fingerprinting to distinguish genuine users from fraudsters and lower false declines.

Implement 3D Secure 2.0 with invisible authentication where possible to comply with regulations while keeping checkout smooth.

Fraud protection platforms with advanced machine learning help optimise fraud prevention, reducing false declines and chargebacks, improving customer experience and increasing payment success.

6. Optimise for Mobile Payments

With over 80% of cart abandonments on mobile, a mobile-friendly checkout is essential for capturing sales and improving payment success.

Useful optimisations include:

• Large, touch-friendly buttons and form elements
• Simplified forms with appropriate mobile keyboards
• Thumb-friendly placement of critical buttons
• Vertical scrolling design

Integrate one-tap payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay for faster checkout.

Make clear labels, real-time error validation, guest checkout options and compatibility across all screen sizes and orientations.

A quick, effortless mobile checkout captures sales from users browsing in short bursts and boosts overall payment success.

7. Monitor and Analyse Payment Data

Tracking payment metrics helps identify issues and improve success rates. Over 80% of companies struggle to pinpoint payment failure causes, making analytics essential.

Focus on metrics such as:

• Funnel completion rates
• Field-level errors and hesitation
• Payment method usage and success
• Device-specific patterns
• Time to completion

Use A/B testing to optimise checkout elements like form layout, button text, security messaging and payment method display. For example, Booking.com’s extensive testing showed that displaying customer reviews during checkout boosts conversions.

To maximise insights:

• Set alerts for unusual success rate changes
• Regularly review and visualise payment data
• Segment by customer type, product or region

Continuous data-driven refinement helps reduce failures, improve customer experience and increase revenue.

8. Partner with Reliable Payment Providers

Your choice of payment provider directly impacts success rates. Look for:

• Robust infrastructure with high uptime
• Comprehensive fraud prevention
• Support for multiple payment methods
• Transparent reporting
• Responsive customer support

Good providers minimise lost sales from outages, offer strong security like tokenisation and provide detailed decline codes to tailor retry strategies.

Local acquiring capabilities boost cross-border approval by routing payments through in-country processors, reducing declines.

Choose partners with proven industry experience, strong authorisation rates, built-in dispute management to reduce chargebacks and capacity for your volume. For subscription models, select processors specialising in recurring payments.

The right payment provider is a strategic partner that supports long-term payment optimisation and improves success rates.

Improve Payment Success Rates for Business Growth

Implementing strategies like offering multiple payment options, simplifying checkout, smart payment routing and automatic retries can improve payment success, boost revenue and enhance customer satisfaction. Even small gains can support sustained growth.

Review your current payment processes and prioritise improvements based on these tactics.

Rapyd Collect supports payments worldwide, combining card acquiring and local methods to simplify checkout and increase authorisations.