What Kinds of Transaction Declines Can Recover Help Resolve?

At Spreedly, our approach to open payments centers around simplifying your business’s payment processes. 

We recently introduced Recover, a solution aimed at improving the performance of payments. Designed to seamlessly retry failed transactions in real-time at secondary gateways, Recover recuperates crucial revenue and saves your team from having to perform time-consuming rerouting tasks. 

To continue our exploration of this new Spreedly-exclusive product, we’re taking a look at why transactions fail and what Recover and other Spreedly solutions can do to help. 

Why Transactions Fail: Primary vs. Secondary Declines

Dealing with payment declines can hinder your financial efficiency and hamper the customer experience, but why do they happen in the first place? Transaction declines can happen for a few reasons, making the necessity of secondary gateways all the more important within an optimized payment stack. 

Rather than defining declines in the traditional “hard” and “soft” categories, we like to instead frame them as primary, secondary, and tertiary. The Recover product is designed mainly to address primary and secondary declines—let’s define these terms in-depth to uncover how Recover can resolve these issues:  

Primary Declines 

Primary declines revolve around outages, such as when a gateway goes down and prevents a payment request from connecting to it. These are often called “hard outages,” in which the gateway itself is unreachable. 

However, there are also “soft outages” under this category in which the gateway may be available, but the transaction runs into problems with other core components of the process, such as acquirer downtime or credential issues. For instance, the problem could stem from an IP address not being whitelisted, leading to a rejected transaction request despite the gateway functioning normally. 

A primary decline can be one of the most straightforward challenges to deal with, as the transaction can easily be rerouted to a secondary gateway when using a product like Recover. While hard outages are rare, soft outages tend to be more common. Recover can give your system a vital safety net to address both. 

Secondary Declines

Secondary failures often involve more complex issues, like fraud prevention or issuer challenges. 

A gateway may receive a transaction but deem it potentially fraudulent. Fraud controls can take time to fine-tune, further emphasizing how essential it is to have backup providers where you can reroute failed transactions. 

Another example comes in the form of merchants experimenting with new gateways. When expanding into a new region, certain gateways may have cost or operational advantages that the primary provider doesn’t offer, but can also come with different risks that may trigger fraud controls used by the merchant or issuer. 

Additional examples of secondary declines can include payment methods in unusable states or payment information that lacks key details like a CVV or CVC. 

Through the Spreedly platform, the Recover product works collaboratively with the Advanced Vault to retry transactions as needed while also keeping stored payment data evergreen. Should a secondary decline occur due to triggered fraud controls, Recover can act swifty to reroute the payment. Meanwhile, the Advanced Vault minimizes the occurrence of failed transactions due to incorrect payment information or missing details.

Your Roadmap to Resolving Transaction Declines

We recommend that all merchants understand the failures and codes coming up most commonly in their authorization rates. Doing so can help you better determine where to invest your time and resources by identifying where the greatest pain points are in your current payment system. 

With this information in hand, you can decide which products are best suited for your needs. If the bulk of your problems are popping up in the primary decline category, Recover is the product for you. 

Conversely, if you have a mix of both primary and secondary declines, consider using a broader mix of products beyond Recover alone, such as the Advanced Vault and tools like Account Updater and Network Authorization. 

Building a reliable payment system is all about trust, and there are ultimately a million different variables that can lead to it succeeding in one place but failing in the next. By leveraging Spreedly’s Open Payments platform, you can not only connect to a wide array of tools to minimize your declines but also integrate as many gateways as you want to optimize your payment performance in your target regions. 

You don’t have to know it all—you just need the right partner to help you fill in your knowledge gaps.

Request a Spreedly demo today to discover the advantages of our platform and product suite. 

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