10 min read

author name

author position

10 min read

TABLE OF CONTENT

Example H2

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

Aldous Huxley

A silent and often underestimated issue is likely eroding your revenue: your credit card decline rate. This rate, the percentage of legitimate customer transactions rejected by payment processors, is more than a minor inconvenience; industry data shows that billions are lost annually due to these "silent declines." This isn’t just about inconvenienced customers; it’s a tangible drain on your bottom line that demands attention. However, the fact remains that ignoring your credit card decline rate doesn’t make the loss any less significant.

What are credit card decline rates?

‍

While each instance of a credit card decline represents a lost sales opportunity, the overall credit card decline rate can be misleading if not examined closely within the context of your specific online business. Generally, businesses across various sectors may experience decline rates between 5% and 15%. However, within the e-commerce practice, these numbers tend to be noticeably higher due to the inherent risks of online transactions.

The financial impact of false declines remains substantial. In 2023, it was estimated that as many as seven in ten transactions rejected by merchants may have been false declines, leading to significant revenue losses. In the U.S. alone, $157 billion in eCommerce sales were at risk due to false declines in 2023, with $81 billion projected to be lost. In contrast, global credit card fraud losses reached a record $33 billion in 2022, with $13.6 billion of those losses occurring in the United States. This indicates that losses from false declines continue to surpass those from credit card fraud, underscoring the importance for merchants to balance fraud prevention with minimizing false declines.

For example, businesses selling physical goods might experience slightly lower rates compared to those offering digital goods. This is primarily due to the immediate delivery and consumption of digital products, which leaves little time for thorough fraud verification, leading merchants to implement stricter fraud detection measures. Consequently, these stringent measures can result in higher rates of false declines. Notably, subscription-based e-commerce models often face pronounced challenges, with decline rates potentially exceeding 20% or even reaching 30% in some cases. This is often attributed to the recurring nature of billing, where expired cards or insufficient funds can lead to involuntary churn.

Businesses facing high credit card decline rates often see signs such as abandoned carts, frustrated customers unable to complete their purchases, and a drop in repeat buyers due to poor payment experiences. These lost transactions represent a delicate balance merchants must strike between preventing fraud and ensuring legitimate customers can successfully complete their payments. The cost of retargeting these lost customers is high, both in terms of marketing expenses and the potential damage to customer trust. Addressing this challenge requires merchants to carefully optimize fraud detection systems, minimize false declines, and maintain availability for legitimate transactions—all while keeping operational costs and customer satisfaction in check.

Bounce's specifically designed solution

‍

The good news for online shop owners is that these often-crippling credit card decline rates aren't an insurmountable obstacle. Solutions like Bounce are specifically designed to tackle this challenge head-on.

Bounce leverages a sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) model that continuously analyzes transaction data to identify and recover potentially lost revenue due to declined payments.

Bounce does more than just recover declined payments; it provides a comprehensive payment optimization approach, including real-time payment analysis.

These are Bounce’s results

Reduce Churn: Experience a 15% reduction in churn, leading to improved customer retention.
Increase Signups: Achieve a 10% increase in signups by ensuring more legitimate transactions are approved.
Improve Authentication: Benefit from a 7% lift in authentication rates, streamlining the customer experience.
Boost Repeat Buyers: See 50% more repeat buyers, indicating stronger customer loyalty.
Enhance Lifetime Value: Realize a 1.5x increase in customer lifetime value, driving long-term profitability.
Drive Top-Line Growth: Achieve an average of 5% top-line growth as a result of these combined improvements. With proven results, Bounce will bring you in the best position and propel your business forward.

Real-world impact: How Bounce Increased revenue for Scale

‍

‍‍To fully understand the impact of Bounce’s intelligent payment recovery, take the example of Scale, an online company specializing in next-generation health and wellness education and products. Facing a significant 20-30% decline rate on subscription renewals, they implemented Bounce and immediately saw tangible results, boosting their subscription retention by 2.4%. Beyond renewals, Bounce’s ML also tackled Scale’s 10% checkout decline rate, successfully recovering 30% of those failed purchases and delivering an impressive 3-5% revenue uplift. This real-world example powerfully demonstrates how Bounce translates into concrete gains for online businesses and helps to uncover hidden opportunities.Calculate Your revenue recovery:Ready to stop the hidden drain on your revenue and uncover the potential gains? See exactly how much revenue your business could lose due to credit card declines – and how much Bounce can help you recover. Get your free assessment now at https://www.bounceup.io/absolute-sign-up.

‍

No alternative text description for this image

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

Aldous Huxley

What are credit card decline rates?

‍

Bounce's specifically designed solution

‍

Bounce leverages a sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) model that continuously analyzes transaction data to identify and recover potentially lost revenue due to declined payments.

Bounce does more than just recover declined payments; it provides a comprehensive payment optimization approach, including real-time payment analysis.

These are Bounce’s results

Reduce Churn: Experience a 15% reduction in churn, leading to improved customer retention.
Increase Signups: Achieve a 10% increase in signups by ensuring more legitimate transactions are approved.
Improve Authentication: Benefit from a 7% lift in authentication rates, streamlining the customer experience.
Boost Repeat Buyers: See 50% more repeat buyers, indicating stronger customer loyalty.
Enhance Lifetime Value: Realize a 1.5x increase in customer lifetime value, driving long-term profitability.
Drive Top-Line Growth: Achieve an average of 5% top-line growth as a result of these combined improvements. With proven results, Bounce will bring you in the best position and propel your business forward.

Real-world impact: How Bounce Increased revenue for Scale

‍

Want to see how Bounce lifts your KPIs?

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Block quote

Ordered list

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Unordered list

Item A
Item B
Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript

10 min read

table of content

Example H2

Add 5% to  your Topline

Combating buyer's fatigue

Cart abandonment often boils down to decision fatigue; when shoppers are bombarded with too many choices, their mental bandwidth gets maxed out, leading to exhaustion and cart abandonment before purchase completion, which is why many strategies now focus on simplification:

Simplify choices: Reduce the number of product options and streamline the decision-making process. Apple, for example, simplified its product lineup, boosting sales.
Provide clear and full information: Ensure that product descriptions are clear and concise, providing all necessary information to make an informed decision without needing to browse through multiple pages. Amazon’s product pages exemplify this approach by highlighting key details and comparisons.
Optimize navigation: Design an intuitive and straightforward navigation system to minimize the effort required to find and select products. Think about how easy it is to work with Google’s clean and user-friendly interface.

Easier checkout processes

A complicated checkout process significantly deters customers from completing purchases. Here's how you can simplify it: Streamline steps: Reduce the number of required fields and steps to complete a purchases; Guest checkout: Let customers checkout without creating an account ;Multiple payment options: Offer various payment gateways and ensure the site is mobile-optimized.

Payment decline and cart abandonment

However, there is the elephant in the room. Customers get really irritated when they encounter incorrect prices or face payment declines at checkout. This doesn’t just lead to cart abandonment; it also destroys the trust and credibility of the e-commerce site. For example, 42% of consumers will abandon their cart if their payment is declined due to suspected fraud. Studies show that customers are more likely to get upset and switch to a competitor after facing a payment decline. This perfect storm of lost sales and damaged reputation screams for exact pricing and a frictionless payment process.

‍

‍

Revolutionizing revenue recovery with Bounce

Bounce identifies and approves false card declines, converting them into successful transactions using advanced machine learning algorithms. This approach not only recovers lost revenue but also enhances customer satisfaction by ensuring legitimate transactions are not mistakenly rejected. Bounce's ML algorithm works seamlessly in real-time to approve valid transactions, ensuring legitimate sales are not lost and a smooth user experience. This immediate, yet seamless, intervention helps:

Increase top line revenue: Recover over 30% of falsely declined transactions, which adds 5% to your top-line revenue.
Improve KPIs: Enhance key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates and customer satisfaction by reducing false card declines.
Enhance customer trust: Provide a smoother, user friendly checkout experience, reducing frustration and improving satisfaction.

Compared to retargeting

Bounce’s solution tackles the root cause of lost sales, proving to be more cost-effective than retargeting campaigns. Retargeting can hike conversion rates by up to 128%, but it comes with extra marketing costs. Preventing false card declines directly recovers sales without additional ad spend, offering a higher ROI.

‍

Don’t let potential sales slip through the cracks

Ready to claw back your lost revenue from false declines? Schedule a demo with Bounce to see how our revolutionary solution can turn hidden losses into wins. Don’t let potential sales slip through the cracks—let Bounce elevate your conversion rate and customer satisfaction. For more information, visit Bounce.

Growth Marketing

Converting free trial users to paying customers

ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me" might not have been about the internet and free trials, but the sentiment fits perfectly: In today’s subscription economy, offering something for free to earn loyalty and commitment is spot-on. In fiercely competitive subscription markets and ecosystems, turning free trial users into paying customers is the difference between a win and a loss.

‍

7 Winning strategies for making your free-trial users into paying customers

1. Streamline the user journey :To avoid user abandonment, it’s crucial to remove friction from your onboarding process. Tools such as FullStory and Hotjar offer detailed analytics and session recordings to help you pinpoint where users encounter difficulties.

2. Personalize the experience: Customizing the onboarding process to meet specific user needs can significantly boost conversion rates. For example, Spotify personalizes its user experience by leveraging user data to tailor the onboarding process. When users sign up for a free trial, Spotify analyzes their listening habits and preferences to suggest playlists and songs they are likely to enjoy. This approach makes the trial experience more engaging and increases the likelihood of conversion paid subscription.

‍

3. Accommodate various learning styles: Provide varied onboarding methods - such as guided tours, checklists, and live workshops - to accommodate different learning styles. Interactive tutorials and personalized guidance can make the onboarding process more engaging and informative.Canva and Notion provide personalized onboarding tutorials during their free trials.

4. Utilize the Zeigarnik Effect:To boost free trial conversions, leverage the Zeigarnik effect. This psychological principle suggests that people have a strong desire to complete tasks they've started. By using 2-step opt-in forms, you can effectively harness this effect. For instance, OptinMonster's prompts users to click a link to open a signup form, increasing the likelihood they’ll complete the action by entering their email. Hubstaff successfully applied this technique, increasing free trial signups by 21% by engaging abandoning visitors with a well-timed popup.

‍

‍

5. Implement behavior-based emails: Dispatch activity-triggered emails to steer users through essential actions. Emphasizing unused features and upgrade benefits keeps users engaged and promotes conversions.

6. Contextualize Upgrade Prompts :Clearly demonstrate how your product addresses specific user problems, making the upgrade decision more compelling. For example, emphasize how a project management tool streamlines workflows and saves time. This contextualization helps users see the tangible benefits of upgrading to a paid plan. For instance, Asana illustrates how their tool can enhance team productivity and project management efficiency.

7.Request payment information upfront: While requesting payment information upfront may reduce the number of free trials, it filters out non-serious users and increases conversion rates. In the subscription ecosystem, it’s often better to have fewer subscribers who are genuinely interested in your product or service. This strategy is commonly used in SaaS models where the conversion rates for opt-out trials, which require payment information upfront, can be as high as 60%, compared to lower rates for opt-in trials.

The credit card decline dilemma

Even with effective strategies, credit card declines remain a significant hurdle, causing involuntary churn and eroding revenue. The actual moment of conversion, often referred to as the "blind zone," is critical. When this zone is not addressed, potential revenue is lost. Common causes include expired cards, fraud holds, insufficient funds and hard declines. Monitoring and addressing these issues can enhance revenue and customer satisfaction. These issues impact not only revenue but also customer experience and operational efficiency.

Stop leaving money at the table

In today's subscription economy, smooth onboarding is key. But what if perfectly valid subscribers are getting flagged at checkout, leading to lost revenue and frustrated customers?

Bounce solves this problem with the power of AI. Our machine learning technology analyzes payment data to identify valid transactions wrongly declined. This means:

An Access to Bounce’s New Tailored Product Swift: Swift is a machine learning solution focused on converting more customers after a free trial. It helps identify users with high intent and ability to pay without charging their cards, ensuring a seamless onboarding experience. Swift operates on two levels: conversion level, predicting chances of becoming paying customers, and action level, suggesting the best actions to turn low-chance users into paying customers. This enhances user experience, accuracy in user acquisition, revenue generation, and understanding of customer lifetime value (LTV).
More Subscribers, More Revenue: We recover up to 20% of lost free trial conversions, translating to a 5% boost in top-line revenue.
Reduced Customer Churn: Bounce ensures a seamless checkout experience, reducing frustration and leading to a 15% decrease in churn. Happy customers stick around longer, boosting your lifetime value (LTV).
Frictionless Signups: Our AI ensures a smooth payment flow, preventing unnecessary friction and keeping customers happy.

Recover Lost Revenue: We identify and approve valid subscribers flagged at checkout, recovering up to 10% of failed signups.
Boost Conversion Rates: Bounce helps convert more free trials into paying customers, leading to a 4% increase in top-line revenue.
Improve Customer Satisfaction: A smooth checkout experience keeps customers happy and reduces churn.

You don't have to take our word for it; we can show you. Schedule a meeting with our experts and see how we can improve your conversion performance.

‍

Growth Marketing

Beyond customer churn: turning failed subscription renewals into revenue

We knew we were losing tens of thousands of dollars in potential revenue each month. We needed a trustworthy solution to optimize the signup subscription process

‍(Roie Shiloah | Head of Growth Simply)

‍

Up to the 20th century, subscriptions were primarily limited to traditional industries like newspapers, magazines, and utilities. However, in the 21st century, subscription models have transformed, expanding into digital media, software, and physical goods, making customer retention and renewal rates critical for profitability. The subscription economy has grown significantly, with a global market size valued at $650 billion in 2020 and projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2025. While subscription-based businesses represent a booming industry, they also face unique challenges, particularly maintaining strong renewal rates. When renewal rates drop, more customers leave the service, directly impacting the bottom line. (e2open.com, thestrategystory.com, statista.com) If you’re managing a subscription business, boosting retention by just 5% could potentially increase your profits by 25% to25% to 95% . However, despite these stakes, many companies overlook the impact of churn and fail to calculate retention metrics—leading to unanticipated revenue losses. Knowing how renewal rates and churn affect growth and sustainability is crucial, yet many businesses are unaware of their true impact.

‍

How leading companies tackle customer churn

‍

To combat customer churn, successful companies use tailored strategies. Here’s how some well-known brands are keeping their customers engaged and loyal:

Personalized customer engagement: Netflix enhances user experience by providing personalized recommendations, keeping customers engaged and loyal.
Loyalty programs: Amazon Prime offers members benefits like free shipping, exclusive deals, and access to streaming services, fostering customer loyalty.
Flexible subscription options: Spotify offers various subscription tiers, including family and student plans, allowing users to choose options that best fit their needs and budgets, thereby reducing churn.

‍

These approaches show how leading companies customize their strategies to reduce churn effectively. But while valuable, these methods often miss a critical factor: payment issues—a hidden but severe contributor to churn rates.

‍

Bounce Holistic: a proven solution for subscription renewals

‍

Bounce’s Holistic solution is designed to tackle one of the most pressing issues in subscription renewals— false credit card payment decline. By analyzing thousands of data points, Bounce’s ML algorithm identifies the reasons behind failed renewals, allowing businesses to recover up to 30% of transactions that would otherwise be lost due to card declines. This proactive approach will reduce churn by 15% and comes with a detailed dashboard that enables clients to observe and effectively address subscription payment issues.

‍

Simply, formerly known as JoyTune, is a global subscription service that faced a significant challenge: 20% of users who downloaded their Piano app and attempted to subscribe were declined due to payment issues. To address this, Simply partnered with Bounce, implementing a machine learning-powered solution to identify and recover incorrectly flagged sign-up subscribers. This collaboration resulted in a 5% increase in total sign-up revenues and a 2% growth in end-of-trial charges and renewals. Bounce’s subscription payment recovery services effectively reduced false declines, enhancing Simply’s customer acquisition and retention efforts.

‍

‍

Achieve better renewal rates and key metrics with payment recovery services

‍

With Bounce Holistic, your business can achieve significant improvements in renewal rates and key metrics without adding budget strain or operational complexity. Discover how you can enhance your revenue and stabilize your growth—book a demo today to see Bounce in action!

‍

Use Cases

Bounce lifts your checkout top line

Checkout fail. It's a familiar pain for marketers.
After investing thousands of dollars in targeting and re-targeting, the excitement of a potential customer placing an order turns into frustration when they fail to convert into a paying customer.
And in many of those cases, it’s due to payment decline.

The hidden cost of checkout churn

Did you know? ^{More than 10% of checkout purchases get thrown out of the funnel}right at the conversion stage due to credit card declines. The user enters his credit card number, hits “purchase”, and receives a failed transaction notice.

Those failed transactions can translate into millions of $ lost for your business, not including the lost marketing costs.

Here's another nugget: ^{30% of failed checkouts can actually be recovered into a closed deal.}
With Bounce’s AI-based payment solution, companies can save up to millions of dollars annually, gaining a higher return on their marketing efforts and lifting their top line by 5%!
The cumulative year-over-year impact of recovering lost checkouts is enormous.

It also goes way beyond immediate top-line revenue.

The fuller picture: understanding company growth impact

Let's explore how failed checkouts influence your business's growth and performance:

Top-line Impact: Lost deals directly dent total revenue, affecting company growth.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Each lost deal not only hampers revenue but also resets the clock on acquiring new customers and increasing your average CAC.
Retargeting Costs: A failed checkout experience is likely to prompt increased spending on retargeting campaigns to re-engage users and target new potential ones.
LTV and Repeat Customers: A declined transaction at checkout leads to a bad user experience, and by that, you risk losing your customer permanently, impacting both the lifetime value (LTV) and the rate of repeat business.
Conversion Rates: Checkout failures directly affect checkout conversion rates and the success of the overall marketing funnel, with fewer leads and visitors that turn into customers and repeat customers.‍
Purchase Size: Customers facing declined transactions tend to abandon their purchase initiative entirely. Of the few that do retry, they will often revisit their cart and remove purchases, resulting in a lower overall purchase value.

Unlocking lost checkout revenue with Bounce

Bounce helps companies prevent revenue loss and all other negative impacts of declined payments.
Our payment recovery platform uses ML to analyze millions of data points, identifying which checkout declines are valid and which ones should not have been declined. ^{Our solution recovers over 30% of payment declines, in real time.}

Bounce seamlessly integrates into your existing checkout process, providing the user with a positive and smooth experience when identified as valid. We’re so sure of our data that the service is risk-free. Your customers enjoy a better checkout experience, and you enjoy a higher return on your marketing efforts.

Here’s how our checkout recovery helps our customers recover tens of thousands of dollars in lost checkout revenue.

Success Stories

Scale turned millions $ in declined checkout and renewals into revenue

Scale is a California based, tech-driven company. They build next-generation health, wellness education, and products that address some of the world's most common health issues. They sell their products online as a subscription base or as a one off purchase and have a checkout process in place.

They knew they had challenges around checkout and subscription conversion and were hoping to find a solution to mitigate that.

We partnered with Hannah Blum, Head of Marketing Strategy, and Chris (Christapor) Arzoumanian, Senior growth product marketing manager, two industry experts.

Diving into Scale’s processes

Scale offers various types of supplements, in 5 different brands, both one-time checkouts and subscription refills. When reviewing Scale’s system, we ran a comprehensive analysis of their payments, to see which failed payments could be saved. Through our ML system, we found that 20%-30% of their customers were being wrongly rejected at the time of subscription refill/ renewal (and could be saved), due to a variety of reasons totally out of Scale’s control. We got to work and implemented our solution.

Shortly after, by cutting out a portion of those card declines, we saw a stream of steady and increased revenue, overall raising their KPIs.

As more deals were seamlessly approved in real-time, a number of things took place. Customer satisfaction levels grew, retention rate improved, and even the ticket size per transaction increased, thanks to frictionless payment experiences.

“We grew our subscription retention rate by 2.4%.”

Bouncing up lost checkout deals

Renewals were just the beginning - while analyzing Scale Media’s checkout transactions, they realized how many of their customers were actually unable to complete their purchase - 10% (!) of their customers were being rejected at checkout, due to different reasons.

We applied our proprietary machine-learning algorithms on Scale’s data, using millions of data points, and identifying which declined checkout transactions should be recovered. With our real-time ML model and zero-risk policy, we were able to recover a full 30% of Scale’s declined checkout transactions. Bounce’s auto-recovered checkout deals lift Scale’s top line by almost 3%.

As Scale’s checkout experience improved, the average user purchase size and total number of purchases increased. Instead of losing potential users to failed checkout processes, Scale was now retaining its leads and customers at much higher rates.

“We work closely with bounce and see bounce’s team as partners. We constantly consult the team with any payment related decision”.

What it’s like to partner with Bounce

Every decision related to payments is a multifaceted process for any company. At Bounce, we thrive on collaboration to enhance your company's payment experiences. Our approach is to seamlessly integrate with your processes, providing valuable insights and guidance.

The successful collaboration with Scale's talented team has driven the desired results – improved metrics and happy customers. Together, we were able to showcase the power of a collaborative approach in transforming payment experiences.

"As for the decision to work with Bounce, it was a pretty straightforward one. We took zero-risk and saw an uplift of 3-5% on our checkout generated revenue"

‍

Credit card decline rate: The hidden revenue killer for e-commerce

What are credit card decline rates?

Bounce's specifically designed solution

These are Bounce’s results

Real-world impact: How Bounce Increased revenue for Scale

What are credit card decline rates?

Bounce's specifically designed solution

These are Bounce’s results

Real-world impact: How Bounce Increased revenue for Scale

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Further reading

Combating buyer's fatigue

Easier checkout processes

Payment decline and cart abandonment

Revolutionizing revenue recovery with Bounce

Compared to retargeting

Don’t let potential sales slip through the cracks

7 Winning strategies for making your free-trial users into paying customers

The credit card decline dilemma

Stop leaving money at the table

How leading companies tackle customer churn

Bounce Holistic: a proven solution for subscription renewals

Achieve better renewal rates and key metrics with payment recovery services

The hidden cost of checkout churn

The fuller picture: understanding company growth impact

Unlocking lost checkout revenue with Bounce

Diving into Scale’s processes

Bouncing up lost checkout deals

What it’s like to partner with Bounce

Keep you
posted?