Rejected transactions in SaaS/E-commerce.
Have you ever come across this issue?
Often, the businesses I work with are completely unaware that rejected transactions are even happening on their platform.
And as a result, they’re losing money.
This is especially true for small businesses. Everyone focuses on the successful, processed transactions and completely ignores the failed ones.
Why bother? Maybe the customer didn’t have enough funds in their account—no need to waste time on it.
But that’s a mistake.
From my experience, there are four main reasons why a transaction might be rejected:
- No funds in the account
- Transaction limits
- Bank/payment processor rejection
- Technical issues
No Funds in the Account – This one is pretty straightforward. If someone doesn’t have money, they can’t pay. But it doesn’t have to be that simple. Maybe they don’t have the funds right now—you can offer them financing or BNPL options. Or maybe they don’t have the money on the specific payment method they were using, but another method could work to complete the payment.
Transaction Limits – A lot of people don’t realize that their accounts/cards have limits. Even fewer know that they could be nearing these limits during a given month. All you need to do is inform them and ask them to adjust their limits. Then they can try the transaction again. It’s really an easy fix for a problem that’s more common than you might think.
Bank Rejected the Transaction – There can be many reasons for this, but most often, it boils down to risk. If a customer has always made payments in a specific way, close to home, in physical terminals, then a transaction in a different currency, from the other side of the world, for a virtual service, might look suspicious to their bank. The bank may block the transaction. The simple solution? Ask the customer to contact their bank and confirm that the transaction is legitimate and should go through. The bank can flag the transaction in their system, and both this and future similar transactions will be processed.
Technical Issues – This can happen at three levels:
- Integration issues with the payment gateway
- A problem within the payment gateway itself
- A problem with the payment method issuer
Ad1. If it’s an integration issue, you’ll need to fix that on your side as soon as possible, and the problem will disappear.
Ad2. If it’s a technical issue with the gateway, you’ll need to reach out to the payment provider and ask if it’s a serious issue. To minimize risk, you might want to switch to a different gateway for the transaction. This can be done through payment orchestration or manually, depending on the setup.
Ad3. If it’s an issue with the payment method issuer, you can allow the customer to retry the transaction later or offer them a different payment method.
So yes, absolutely. A list of rejected transactions is an invaluable source of information—often underestimated—but one that offers an easy way to boost revenue.
