Payment Gateway Failure Reasons: Top Causes & Fixes Explained

Payment gateway failure is annoying both for the e-commerce store and the customer. For the customer, it breaks the flow of shopping and creates frustration. While for the e-commerce store, it causes a loss of business and reputation. There are multiple payment gateway failure reasons that can ruin your best sales days.

It is estimated that payment gateway failures can result in losses to the tune of 3.6% for businesses. At Provis Technologies, we understand how critical it is to address this issue promptly. Ensuring a fix for payment failures is essential for e-commerce businesses to survive and thrive. There are certain tried and tested methods that can fix this payment gateway failure issue, and that is what we will take a deeper look at.

Impact of Payment Gateway Failure

Online payment issues caused by payment gateway failure can have a significant impact on a business. This includes:

• Loss of sales and credibility 

• Frustration for customers 

• Longer order processing time 

• Loss of competitive edge in the market

There are certain common reasons or causes due to which the payment gateway failure happens. Some of these reasons are controllable at the business end while some are at the user end. User end reasons are related with manual errors that an user is likely to make at the check out page.

Therefore understanding all those possible reasons can help identify the loopholes that need to be fixed. A timely assessment of the issues can save failure and losses in long run.

Common Causes of Payment Gateway Failure

• Downtime issue: Server downtime is a major cause for the decline of online payments. It can happen due to a downtime at the merchant’s end or the processor’s end, at the bank’s end, or for all of them, or a couple of them. Downtime usually happens during a sale, like a festive sale or discount sale, when lots of traffic comes to website.

• Misconfiguration error: Misconfiguration of the payment gateway is another major reason for the decline of payments. It usually happens when the settings on the merchant side and the payment gateway side are not aligned. Like for example, the payment gateway does authentication in a certain way, however, the merchant follows a different authentication process. 

• Data entry errors: These types of errors happen at the user end during checkouts. It involves the entering of the wrong card number, CVV, expiry date, etc, by the users. There is not much that you can do for such errors, except for creating user awareness. 

• 3DS2 caused failure: 3DS2 (3-D Secure 2.0) is an advanced multi-factor authentication process that secures the user’s information. It is known to simplify the checkouts securely. Generally, it requires authentication via One-time password (OTP), fingerprint scan, face ID, etc. In case there is an issue of authentication from the user end, like entering the wrong OTP, the transaction fails. 

• Insufficient funds: Insufficient funds in the user’s account or blocked amount often cause payment failures. The merchant and gateway try to establish the link with the bank for payment, but in this case, it is declined.

• Exceeding the limit of transaction: Banks generally set a payment limit for a single transaction for credit and debit cards. When the user exceeds that transaction limit in a single purchase, the payment is declined. 

• Location-related issues: This happens when the user tries to make a payment on a website from a different geographical region. It can also happen when the user’s bank has blocked payment to a specific geographical location. The location of the user and the website’s operational area being different leads to failure. 

• Billing Address Mismatch: For security reasons, many e-commerce websites have an Address Verification System (AVS) installed. This matches the shipping or billing address with the registered address of the credit or debit card. A mismatch in the address can cause the payment failure. 

Fixes for Payment Gateway Failure

Having understood the various Payment gateway failure reasons, it’s time to see how it can be fixed. 

• Gateway with multiple payment options: Choose a payment gateway that offers different payment modes to the user. This way, users can choose the preferred payment mode that has their details saved. This reduces the chances of data entry errors and payment decline.

• Dynamic Routing: Dynamic routing is a method that selects the best payment method at checkout pages. For each transaction, it displays the option with high success rates to the user. Further, it shows those payment modes that have downtime. Thus, minimizing the downtime-related errors.

• Auto-retry: Auto-retry method silently reinitiates the payment process after encountering a failure. It identifies the reason for the failure and initiates the debit call again and again till the request is successful or the time limit is out. 

• High volume gateways: Opting for payment gateways that have higher volume handling capacity is a big plus. Advanced and highly functional payment gateways use serverless architecture. This ensures ease of payment and checkout with minimum risk of failure.

• User awareness: Creating user awareness in regards to saving of details on payment gateways can be very helpful. Sending a message or alert to the user as they enter the checkout page is a good idea. The message can highlight points about entering the right payment details to avoid failure. 

• Single-page checkout: A single-page checkout page can help in reducing payment failures. It cuts the hassle of multiple process and allows used to enter all details at once. Users can easily enter the details from shipping address to card details all at once. Reduced data entry error, smooth interface, thus lower chances of online payment error.

Conclusion 

Payment gateway failure can be annoying and critical for the business. With almost every other e-commerce website facing it at some point of time or the other. Certain things like the data entry error, or bank set limit is where nothing much can be done. These are user end errors about which awareness can be created. For other issues the implementation of the fixes that we have discussed above can significantly reduce the payment gateway failures.