Recovering Lost Sales From Declined Charges

Timely Action Required On Decline Order Notification

[incrediBILL]

During a downturn economy, or any economy for that matter, you need to do everything possible to capture every sale, especially those that have progressed to the point that the customer is attempting to checkout with his/her credit card and failing.

Sales are often being declined due to a variety of minor technical details with AVS or other reasons that manually processing the card can resolve.

My ecommerce sites send the webmaster an ORDER DECLINE NOTIFICATION each time an order is submitted that fails to clear the credit card processor.

Instead of seeing a transaction summary report a day after the fact, you see the declines happening as they appear in your inbox in real time. This also allows you to see attempted fraud charges testing credit card limits per decline or an attack on your payment gateway racking up gateway fees. But for the sake of this discussion, most likely you'll catch people trying to fix AVS problems or being declined due to temporary gateway issues which means a lost sale without any real-time intervention.

After waiting a while after a ORDER DECLINE NOTIFICATION or two, you could opt to email or call your customer and help by manually processing the CC on the payment processing terminal and disable AVS if it's invalidly declining the sale.

With a real-time chat system installed you could also supply a live help window for customers in checkout crisis or proactively break-in and offer to help right away.

Just don't let too much time has elapse from an order declined to keep their interest on completing the purchase with your online store instead of just going elsewhere.

Additionally, some people don't like to put PayPal on their site but we offer PayPal as an alternative payment method for customers having issues checking out which recovers more than a few failed checkouts.

Currently we're recovering about 20% of abandoned sales that fail at checkout.

Don't let the customer go away so close to paying, engage that customer and save that sale!

[jecasc]

We do a similar thing with our Paypal payments. Once we realized that Paypal had up to 30 percent abandonment rate in our country - mostly usability issues and translation errors (there have been improvements in the last two years however) - we changed our shopping cart system, so we would get the order first and redirect the customers to Paypal only after the order process was fully complete. Now every customer that selects Paypal gets an automated email presenting alternative payment options in case the Paypal payment fails.

Which brings me to another big issue for increasing conversions. Start giving people alternatives to credit card payments. If you only accept credit cards you will have lost the order forever once the credit card has been declined. Especially if you want to sell to Europe presenting alternatives to credit cards is a must. The market share for credit card payments in the internet is below 30% in some countries. This means you pass on 70% of potential customers.