The “Why” of Payments Orchestration: Introducing Recover

Payment technologies seem to be a dime a dozen these days, begging the question: what makes one approach superior to the next? At Spreedly, we hear it from clients all the time — “Why do we need payments orchestration and open payments?” and “What makes your platform so special?”

Our new product, Recover, aims to provide the answer to these critical questions. 

Designed to look for gateway outages and soft declines, Recover automatically detects and retries transactions in real-time. Not only will this improve overall payment reliability, but it can also optimize payment performance to help clients recover lost revenue and boost overall success rates. 

Today, we’re answering your top questions about the Recover product and all it has to offer.

First Things First, What is Recover?

Whether you’re looking for authorization uplift, optimization, or both, this product is for you.

Recover aims to strategically optimize the performance of transactions to not only improve reliability but also increase your success rates and recover lost revenue. With Recover, you can:

• Mitigate outages with automatic failovers
• Retry transactions immediately using secondary gateways 
• Add a set of standard retry codes or set custom recovery rules according to your needs

In practice, these capabilities work together as follows— the automatic failover process prevents lost transactions due to outages, allowing those transactions to be immediately retried at secondary gateways based on decline codes, also called soft declines, to increase the overall success rate. 

The importance of such capabilities cannot be understated. Don’t just take it from us, consider what one Spreedly customer has to say on the matter:

“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.”

This is no small feat either, nor an advantage to ignore—Spreedly customer data reveals an average of 7.9% of failed transactions are successful when retried immediately on a secondary gateway. What’s more is our customers experience an average success rate uplift of 0.76% when using Recover. 

Addressing and Enhancing Payment Performance

Recover is ultimately an open payments optimization tool that helps Spreedly focus on two main issues from an organizational level—connectivity and performance. 

The Recover product relies on open payments connectivity but is designed to act as a performance-based tool that can address both of these issues at once. Having access to multiple types of connections via an open payments infrastructure allows this tool to enact essential processes like retry and intelligent routing that can completely reimagine how merchants deal with payment failures. 

We can look at how Recover lends itself to performance into two key ways:

1. Hard outages

Hard outages are the less prevalent but still troublesome challenge that Recover helps to overcome. 

In a catastrophic scenario, everything can be operating smoothly and still go wrong due to a failure of your primary gateway. It won’t matter if your credentials are up to date or how good your transaction is; if that primary gateway goes down, the payment experience goes down with it. 

Recover can automatically retry transactions at a secondary gateway, preventing your team from needing to enact mechanisms manually to reroute traffic to a backup payment service provider (PSP), saving crucial seconds. Even a minute of downtime can have a deeply detrimental impact on the customer experience, particularly in customer-initiated transactions, making the few seconds that Recover can salvage a massive advantage in these scenarios. 

2. Soft outages

Most of the big gateways perform well and rarely go down, causing clients to feel confident in their ability to avoid hard outages. Yet, soft outages can still occur even when your primary gateway is operating normally. Examples of this can include:

• Blocked IP addresses
• Accidental changes to API access credentials
• Out-of-date certifications

These types of scenarios can happen even if a gateway is available. The main issue in such cases is not a hard outage but, instead, an issue connecting with a particular gateway. 

We see these kinds of problems come up especially when merchants are using new gateways, which can be problematic when working to set up a multi-provider system. This brings us back to open payments, in which merchants want the freedom to experiment and add new PSPs, but are inherently afraid of new connections not working and disrupting their payment flow. 

Where Recover comes in is, when soft outages occur, it can act as the risk mitigator to that experimentation. If one gateway denies a request, no problem—Recover can automatically reroute and retry the transaction at a different gateway with a higher chance of success. 

For merchants, this allows them to test out new gateways and still fail back over to their primary gateway automatically without disturbing the reliability of the payment stack. 

Why Recover is an Essential Piece of the Spreedly Ecosystem

The Recover product is specifically designed for Spreedly merchants. 

Why? Because while other platforms force you into closed environments, Spreedly offers an independent vault and multiple gateway connectivity that only we can provide. 

Our open payments platform can benefit merchants of all sizes. Recover ensures you gain an immediately meaningful improvement to revenue recovery, especially when selling big-ticket items. 

For instance, the ability to salvage a $100 payment inherently poses a more significant positive outcome than salvaging a $1 or even $10 payment. At the end of the day, even those smaller transactions can amount to a substantial business impact, and Recover ensures that salvaged payment happens within the first few crucial seconds to keep your customers coming back for more. 

You also get the freedom of choice in terms of when Recover should jump into action. The product gives you the flexibility to enable retries for outages only, soft declines only, or a custom solution based on your needs. When paired with solutions like our Advanced Vault, you can achieve more universal optimization across your entire payment system.

There’s also the global advantage to consider. The Recover products offers support for the top 10 globally-compatible gateways currently used by 80% of our customers at Spreedly. What’s more, you only need to choose from these 10 for your primary gateway—your secondary gateway destination can be selected from our entire catalog of 120 supported options. 

Start Improving Your Payment Performance with Recover

Get in touch with Spreedly to discover the possibilities of open payments. With our platform, you can begin using Recover to keep your transactions flowing and optimize your payment stack.

Request a demo today.

Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below