They were good orders that could have been fulfilled. These declines were accompanied by messages like ‘do not honor’ and ‘processor declined’. The varied reasons notwithstanding, 52% of the orders merchants thought were suspicious transactions turned out to be good orders that were caught in the fraud nets. Integrating these strategies with your accounts receivable and billing software can help prevent these declines and reduce the chance for loss of revenue. Most of these credit card declines can be avoided and those that turn into failed payments can be recovered by understanding the mechanics of failed payments. That being said in most cases, the customer is left to wonder, “ Why was my credit card declined?” It’s time to understand the few common error messages that you might come across to make yours and your customer life better. The second reason is that if the purchases were made by fraudsters, providing this level of decline information could potentially allow fraudsters to reverse engineer the fraud system and learn how to bypass the fraud checks.” They are reluctant to share with merchants that the cardholder is behind on paying their bill, maxed out on their credit card, or have lost their card. “First, card issuers are protecting their cardholders’ privacy. In the same way, Braintree throws up error codes like 20.Įthoca, a charge and fraud protection company contacted several card issuers and asked. Authorize.Net, for example, throws up error codes as you see in the screenshot above: E00005 and E00027. Error codes differ from gateway to gateway. Unfortunately, there are no standardized error codes that might help them make sense of what went wrong. If their card is declined, they will see an error code and an error message. Say your customer is in the process of checking out and has just hit the ‘pay’ button after giving their information. Your gateway puts them down so you can take a look at the failed payment later. Irrespective of what’s causing the payment failure, every time a card is declined, your gateway (or processor) issues two accompanying, but different pieces of information,Īn error code: It is typically a number, a code that identifies the error to the system.Īn error message: It is typically in words, a message that identifies the problem to you and your customer.īoth codes and messages are recorded for you. Understanding decline codes and error messages Hard declines usually require the payment card information to be updated before the transaction will be successful, regardless of how many retries are attempted. Hard declines, by contrast, occur when the issuing bank does not approve payment for processing. In that same sense, soft declines occur when the bank issuing the funds has approved the payment, but the transaction fails somewhere else. If one of these parties in the chain is down, interrupted, or unavailable during the transaction resolution, a problem will occur.” There are two common reasons for declines, Soft declinesĪs David Goodale, CEO of Merchant Accounts writes, “If you think of the payment process as a chain of events, there are several “handshakes” that must occur in order for a transaction to complete. Breaking down payment failure Understanding the types of credit card declines According to Visa and Mastercard, an average of 15% of recurring payments are declined, but for some industries, the rate can be double that.įor a better purview of how credit card payments are processed online, check out this piece on payment gateways - the credit card machines of the web. There could be a variety of reasons for this. It’s a common problem faced by businesses that process recurring payments. Strategies to reduce credit card declinesĪ credit card decline occurs if, for a particular reason, a credit card payment cannot be processed and the transaction is declined by the payment gateway, the processor, or the bank issuing the money. Understanding decline codes and error messages.Understanding the types of credit card declines.In this post, we will tell you everything you need to know about dealing with credit card declines and most importantly, how you can recover ‘lost revenue’ due to these declines.įeel free to deep dive into the segment you’d like to know more about, The biggest of their woes is credit card declines. While an increased spend on credit cards has led to a surge in the number of e-payments being processed every day, it has also given rise to some challenges for the users and businesses alike. Credit card statistics 1 say that as of July 2020, there are 1.06 billion credit cards in use in the United States of America alone and 2.8 billion credit cards in use worldwide.

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