Multi-Acquiring Strategies

Multi-Acquiring Strategies with Smart Retry

Last updated:September 26, 2024
Imagine you’re a merchant running a bustling eCommerce business. Your customers come from all over the world, and ensuring their payments go through smoothly is crucial for maintaining your reputation and driving sales. This is where Smart Retry comes into play, a sophisticated solution designed to enhance your payment processing by automatically resending failed transactions to fallback acquirers, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

The Power of Smart Retry

Overcoming Temporary Hiccups

Consider a scenario where a customer is eagerly purchasing a limited-edition item from your store. They enter their payment details, but due to a temporary issue with your primary acquirer, the transaction fails. Without Smart Retry, this could mean a lost sale and a disappointed customer. However, with Smart Retry, the transaction is automatically redirected to a fallback acquirer, successfully completing the sale. The customer is happy, and you’ve secured the revenue without any manual intervention.

Navigating Risk Profiles

Another common challenge is dealing with transactions that are flagged as high-risk by acquirers. For instance, a customer from a high-risk region attempts to make a purchase. The primary acquirer declines the transaction due to its risk profile. Smart Retry steps in, rerouting the transaction to a fallback acquirer that has more flexibility in accepting high-risk transactions. The payment goes through, and you’ve managed to convert a potentially lost sale into a successful one.

Optimizing Conversion Rates

Merchants often face issues with acquirers declining payments based on Merchant Category Codes (MCC). Imagine you run an online store selling sporting goods. Your primary acquirer declines a transaction due to the MCC associated with high-risk categories. Smart Retry can automatically resubmit the transaction using a different MCC relevant to your industry, such as retail or apparel. This increases the likelihood of the payment being accepted, boosting your conversion rates.

Business Model

Depending on your business model, you can determine how to best recover a payment transaction based on the initial authorization failure reason:
  • Automatic smart retrying with a global acquirer when payment transactions fail with a local acquirer.
  • Automatic smart retrying with a fallback acquirer that has greater flexibility to accept high-risk profile customers and transactions.

Benefits

You can configure retry options for each channel without the need to update or adjust the payment integration. Smart Retry:

  • Supports an enhanced customer experience and drives conversion rates by resubmitting failed transactions for a second attempt.
  • Helps to recover lost sales and optimize the payment flow to maintain operational efficiency.
  • Helps merchants to deliver excellent acceptance levels and enhanced service to their customers by protecting their reputation, supporting loyalty, and encouraging repeat business.
  • Does not require a separate agreement or any adjustment in pricing. Only the additional retried transactions get charged.

Enhancing Customer Experience

Picture a customer trying to make a purchase during a flash sale. The initial payment attempt fails due to a soft bank reject, perhaps because of a temporary network issue. Smart Retry immediately resubmits the transaction, either to the same acquirer or a different one, ensuring the payment goes through. The customer completes their purchase without even realizing there was an issue, enjoying a smooth and uninterrupted shopping experience.

Handling Authentication Challenges

In the world of online payments, authentication is key. Suppose a customer’s payment is declined due to a soft decline from the issuer requesting Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Smart Retry can automatically resubmit the transaction with the necessary authentication data, ensuring compliance with security requirements while still processing the payment successfully. This not only secures the transaction but also builds trust with your customers.

Bank Rejects

  • Soft bank rejects are temporary and can happen anywhere in the processing chain up to the issuing bank. These rejections often stem from issues with the connection to the acquirer, overly-protective fraud checks by the acquirer, or how transactions are flagged from the acquirer to the issuing bank. Transactions can be immediately retried, often leading to successful processing of legitimate transactions.
  • Hard bank rejects are more permanent authorization failures coming directly from the issuing bank. These failures may be caused by stolen cards, invalid cards, closed account cases, or insufficient funds, among other reasons. When a hard bank rejection occurs, the issue lies with the issuing bank, and transactions should not be retried unless the underlying issues have been resolved.

The Smart Retry feature is particularly effective for handling soft bank rejects, as it allows for automatic resubmission of failed transactions to the same or an alternative acquirer, increasing the likelihood of successful payment completion.

Integrations

Ready to integrate Smart Retry into your payment processing system? Visit our integration page for detailed instructions and resources to get started quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion

Smart Retry is more than just a fallback mechanism; it’s a powerful tool that helps you navigate the complexities of payment processing. By automatically handling failed transactions and optimizing the payment flow, Smart Retry ensures that your customers enjoy a seamless shopping experience, and you maintain operational efficiency and high conversion rates. Embrace Smart Retry to protect your reputation, support customer loyalty, and drive repeat business.

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