How to Reduce Payment Declines and Increase Revenue

Every online merchant focuses on getting customers to the checkout page, but what happens next can quietly erode your profits. Payment declines are one of the most overlooked friction points in eCommerce. A customer is ready to buy, their cart is full, their intent is high, and then the transaction fails. Sometimes they try again. Often, they don’t.

In fact, up to 15% of online payments are declined, and many of those declines are preventable. That means your business could be losing significant revenue without ever realizing it. The good news? With the right tools and strategies, you can dramatically reduce payment failures and keep more revenue flowing.

Why Payments Get Declined (Even When They Shouldn’t)

Not all payment declines are created equal. While some are legitimate, due to insufficient funds or flagged fraud, many are false declines. These are transactions that appear risky to the processor or bank but are actually valid.

The most common reasons for failed payments include:

• Mismatched billing information (AVS failures)
  
  
  

• Expired or outdated cards
  
  

• Overly strict fraud filters
  
  

• Bank declines due to unusual transaction behavior
  
  

• Processor-specific rules and limits
  
  

• Technical or API errors during authorization
  
  

These issues don’t just block transactions, they frustrate customers, damage trust, and increase the likelihood of cart abandonment. Worse, most merchants have no idea why a payment failed or how to fix it.

The Real Cost of Declines

Let’s say your store does $100,000 in monthly revenue. If just 8% of transactions are falsely declined, and even half of those customers abandon their purchase for good, you’re losing $4,000+ per month in preventable revenue.

And it’s not just lost sales. Declines also:

• Lower customer lifetime value (LTV)
  
  
  

• Inflate your support and recovery costs
  
  
  

• Damage your brand’s reputation
  
  
  

• Trigger more chargebacks if customers retry through unsafe means
  
  
  

Reducing payment declines is one of the highest-leverage growth tactics you can deploy, and often the least visible.

How to Reduce Declines and Keep Revenue Flowing

Improving payment success starts with visibility and control. Here’s how to build a smarter, decline-resistant checkout process:

1. Use a Modern, Flexible Payment Infrastructure

Outdated or rigid payment systems often fail to adapt to real-time transaction dynamics. By using a modern checkout solution like Lasso, you gain access to smart routing, dynamic retry logic, and real-time decline insights, all of which reduce friction and increase success rates.

Lasso allows merchants to integrate with multiple processors and automatically reroute failed payments through a secondary gateway, without the customer needing to start over. That means fewer lost sales and a smoother experience.

2. Monitor Decline Reasons and Take Action

Your payment processor typically provides reason codes for declines, but most merchants ignore them. With the right tools, you can analyze trends and identify recurring issues (e.g., AVS mismatches, fraud filters, bank-specific blocks) and adjust accordingly.

Using Lasso’s data dashboard, merchants can track decline rates by card type, geography, device, and provider, and implement changes that directly improve conversion rates.

3. Enable Smart Retry Logic

Many declines can be recovered automatically with intelligent retry systems. For example, if a payment fails due to a network timeout or suspected risk flag, retrying with the same or alternate processor within seconds can resolve the issue before the customer even notices.

Lasso supports real-time retries and dynamic payment routing, so your checkout can adapt to processor availability and user behavior in real time.

4. Capture Clean, Complete Data

Most failed payments stem from bad data, like mismatched billing info, expired cards, or incomplete checkout fields. Make sure your checkout collects all required information clearly and validates it before submitting to the processor.

With Lasso, merchants can optimize field logic, enforce formatting standards, and use autofill enhancements to reduce user error and improve data quality, before it reaches the processor.

5. Optimize for Global Payments

If you sell internationally, payment success depends on localization. That means accepting local payment methods, currencies, and ensuring that your checkout supports regional data formatting.

Lasso supports multi-currency checkout, regional processor support, and custom logic based on user location, helping you reduce international declines and increase global conversion rates.

Lasso: Built to Maximize Payment Acceptance

Lasso Checkout is engineered to reduce payment friction at every step of the buyer journey. Our platform combines first-party data collection, smart processor integrations, and real-time recovery tools to help merchants recover revenue they didn’t even realize they were losing.

With Lasso, you gain:

• Processor failover and routing, minimizing single-point failure
  
  
  

• Built-in decline recovery logic, improving approval rates automatically
  
  
  

• Real-time tracking of payment health, so you always know what’s working
  
  
  

• Data-enriched checkout UX, reducing user input errors and drop-off
  
  
  

Whether you're running a high-volume store or scaling globally, Lasso helps you turn failed payments into completed orders, without added complexity.

Final Thoughts

Payment declines are often seen as an unavoidable part of eCommerce, but they don’t have to be. With modern infrastructure, real-time data, and intelligent routing, merchants can reduce failure rates, improve customer satisfaction, and recover thousands in lost revenue each month.

If you're relying on a single processor, ignoring decline reasons, or operating without retry logic, you’re leaving money on the table. Lasso gives you the tools to close those gaps and unlock the revenue hiding in plain sight, your failed payments.