Conversion reporting
Cardflo's conversion reporting provides detailed insights into payment performance, allowing merchants to understand where transactions succeed or fail. By analysing key metrics such as approval rates, decline reasons, and payment method performance, businesses can identify bottlenecks, optimise their payment strategy, and recover lost revenue.
This data-driven approach supports continuous improvement across the payment lifecycle.
- Category
- Reporting
- Capabilities
- 10
- Available on
- All plans
The overview
Conversion reporting functions as a diagnostic layer within the payment stack, aggregating data from issuers and acquirers to assess the efficacy of transaction processing. It moves beyond basic settlement reporting by scrutinising the authorisation phase of the payment lifecycle.
By categorising outcomes into successful authorisations, soft declines, and hard declines, merchants can distinguish between temporary issues like insufficient funds and permanent failures such as invalid credentials.
These reports typically utilise data points from the payment gateway and merchant identification numbers to isolate performance variables across different geographies and merchant category codes.
Understanding these metrics is essential for identifying technical friction points in the Strong Customer Authentication flow or misconfigurations in risk filtering that may lead to false positives.
Effective reporting provides the empirical basis for adjusting routing logic or modifying the presentation of alternative payment methods to align with consumer behaviour and regional preferences.
How it works
Data Aggregation and Normalisation
Raw response codes from various acquirers are gathered and mapped to standardised categories. Since different banks use varying nomenclature for similar decline reasons, this process ensures that 'do not honour' and 'transaction not permitted' responses are analysed within a consistent framework for cross-provider comparison.
Categorisation of Decline Reasons
Transactions are filtered based on the specific error codes returned by the issuer via the card schemes. By separating technical errors, such as timed-out requests or 3DS failures, from financial declines like credit limit exceeded, merchants can target specific technical or operational remediations.
Segmentation by Transaction Variable
Reporting tools segment successful authorisations against total attempts by variable. This includes analysing performance by Bank Identification Number, currency, and device type.
This granular view helps identify if specific issuer groups or mobile browsers are experiencing higher failure rates during the checkout process.
Performance Benchmarking and Trends
Historical data is utilised to establish a performance baseline for typical authorisation rates. By monitoring these benchmarks, the system can alert operators to sudden deviations, such as an uptick in soft declines that might indicate an undeclared outage at a specific processing centre or gateway.
Why it matters
Identification of Technical Friction
Conversion reporting highlights where 3DS challenges or SCA requirements are causing drop-offs. If a specific issuer consistently declines transactions without a challenge, it may indicate a protocol mismatch.
Resolving these technical discrepancies directly impacts the bottom line by recapturing transactions that would otherwise be abandoned due to preventable friction in the authorisation request.
Optimising Acquirer Relationships
By comparing the authorisation rates of multiple acquirers for the same traffic profile, businesses can determine which partners provide the best performance for specific regions or card types.
This data justifies the redistribution of volume to providers that demonstrate superior stability and higher success rates, thereby reducing the total cost of acceptance per successful transaction.
Use cases
Subscription and Recurring Billing
Merchants utilising merchant-initiated transactions can monitor the success of automated retries. Analysing why initial captures fail allows for better scheduling of dunning cycles to align with typical salary dates and issuer behaviour.
Cross-Border Market Expansion
When entering new territories, businesses use conversion data to assess if local acquirers outperform cross-border processing. This informs the decision to establish local legal entities and MIDs to minimise foreign exchange friction.
High-Volume Sales Events
During peak traffic, real-time reporting identifies if specific payment methods or gateways are hitting rate limits. This allows for immediate adjustments to routing to bypass bottlenecks and maintain total throughput.
By the numbers
This represents the typical performance improvement observed when merchants use granular data to optimise routing between multiple acquirers based on issuer behaviour.
Industry benchmarks suggest this percentage of failed transactions can often be recovered through data-driven retry strategies and better transaction timing.
Standard industry reporting indicates that well-optimised 3DS flows typically aim to keep authentication-related abandonment below this threshold to maintain healthy conversion.
Related terms
Talk to our team about a live rollout on your acquiring stack.
What you get with Conversion reporting
- Analyse authorisation success rates across diverse merchant identification numbers and acquirer accounts.
- Categorise decline responses to distinguish between issuer-side financial limits and gateway technical errors.
- Evaluate the impact of 3DS authentication success on final transaction completion rates per region.
- Track performance variance between disparate payment methods including digital wallets and local bank transfers.
- Monitor the effectiveness of account updater services in reducing declines for recurring billing cycles.
- Compare conversion metrics across different device types to identify mobile-specific checkout friction points.
- Identify trends in soft declines to optimise the timing and frequency of retry logic.
- Assess the influence of card-product types on approval rates for high-value transactions.
- Generate granular reports on Bank Identification Number performance to pinpoint specific issuer-related issues.
- Visualise historical conversion trends to establish baseline expectations for seasonal shopping periods.
A short scoping call, then a written plan for your MIDs.
Questions about Conversion reporting
What is the difference between a gross and a net authorisation rate?
The gross authorisation rate reflects the total number of approved transactions divided by the total number of attempts, including retries. The net authorisation rate, or unique success rate, filters out multiple attempts for the same transaction to show how many unique customers successfully paid.
Conversion reporting should track both to ensure that a high volume of retries does not mask an underlying problem with the initial payment attempt or checkout flow stability.
How can reporting help distinguish between a soft decline and a hard decline?
Conversion reporting maps the raw ISO 8583 response codes from the issuer. A soft decline, such as 'insufficient funds', indicates a temporary issue where a retry might succeed.
A hard decline, such as 'stolen card' or 'account closed', indicates a permanent failure. Reporting allows merchants to isolate these categories; if soft declines are unusually high, it may suggest a need for better dunning management or smarter transaction scheduling.
Why is it important to monitor conversion by Bank Identification Number (BIN)?
BIN-level reporting reveals how specific card issuers treat your transactions. Some issuers may have stricter risk filters for certain merchant category codes or cross-border traffic.
By identifying BINs with low approval rates, a merchant can work with their acquirer to improve the data passed in the authorisation message, such as AVS or CVV data, or consider local acquiring to appear as a domestic transaction to that issuer.
Does conversion reporting include drop-offs during the 3-D Secure challenge?
Comprehensive reporting should track the transaction through the 3DS lifecycle. This includes the initial request, whether a challenge was required, and if the user abandoned the session at the authentication screen.
Identifying a high drop-off rate during the 3DS stage often indicates a user experience issue or a technical failure in the redirection to the issuer's ACS page rather than a lack of funds.
How does reporting assist in managing multi-acquirer setups?
In a multi-acquirer environment, conversion reporting serves as the primary tool for A/B testing. By routing similar traffic to two different acquirers, a merchant can objectively measure which provider yields a higher authorisation rate for specific card types or regions.
This data informs smart routing rules, allowing the merchant to prioritise the acquirer that demonstrates the most consistent performance and lowest refusal rates.
Can reporting help reduce the cost of interchange and scheme fees?
While conversion reporting focuses on success rates, it indirectly affects costs. By identifying and fixing the causes of repeated declines, merchants avoid the per-transaction fees often associated with failed authorisation attempts.
Furthermore, understanding which transactions are being downgraded to higher interchange tiers due to missing data allows for technical adjustments that ensure more transactions qualify for lower cost-plus rates.
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