"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

(Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense)

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E-commerce is bleeding billions due to cart abandonment, posing a daunting challenge within the e-commerce ecosystem, with an abandonment rate of 70.19% (according to the Baymard Institute). Businesses lose $18 billion yearly from unfinished transactions alone. Certain industries are more severely impacted: 

• The travel sector, including cruise and ferry websites, faces the highest rates with up to 98% of carts being abandoned
•  The fashion industry experiences rates of approximately 87.79%, 
•  The mobile providers and airline industries contend with abandonment rates of 90%. 

Despite the prevalence of cart abandonment, awareness among stakeholders and e-tailers varies. Reports indicate that 74% of e-commerce managers recognize cart abandonment as a critical issue, yet only 40% actively track and analyze this data to understand its financial impact. Here's the kicker: Instead of relying on remarketing strategies, businesses should focus on addressing the psychological, UI, and especially money transfer issues that lead to abandoned carts in online shopping.

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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.

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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.

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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.

“People in all fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”

 (Moneyball)

It’s September, and while most people are winding down from Labor Day, for online shop owners like you, it’s not just the end of summer—it’s the start of something bigger. With Labor Day sales fresh in mind, you’re already looking ahead to the next big events: Black Friday on November 29th and Cyber Monday on December 2nd. These days mark the beginning of the high-sales season, a crucial period that can significantly impact your financial year. “In 2023, Cyber Monday alone generated $12.4 billion in online sales in the U.S, offering merchants a prime opportunity to boost revenue and expand their customer base.

As a Shopify merchant, you’re not just thinking about sales; you’re strategizing on how to handle the surge in traffic, optimize Shopify checkout process, and provide an exceptional shopping experience. While others are still months away from considering holiday shopping, you’re already preparing your store to capitalize on this peak season. Gone are the days when every operational detail needed hands-on management, platforms like Shopify offer integrated solutions for inventory management, payment processing, and marketing automation, enabling you to focus on scaling and enhancing customer satisfaction.

However, the platform also presents some challenges that need to be addressed to fully 

capitalize on the upcoming shopping season:

Understanding main checkout challenges with your Shopify app

1.Shopify’s built-in fraud detection can be overly conservative, leading to legitimate transactions being flagged as fraudulent. In fact, NoFraud’s analysis found that 84.4% of “medium risk” orders were actually safe, meaning most of these good deals were wrongly declined. 

2. International transactions and abandoned checkouts: Cross-border transactions are often flagged as high-risk, leading to higher false decline rates and increased cart abandonment.

3.Subscription and recurring payments: Recurring payment models on Shopify are particularly susceptible to issues with false declines because the platform relies on third-party apps for subscription management, which can lead to higher rates of payment failures and involuntary churn, causing significant revenue loss for businesses dependent on consistent income streams.

Proven ways to optimize your Shopify checkout process

Here are four effective strategies to optimize your Shopify checkout and prepare for the busy shopping season:

•  Third-party fraud tools: Tools like Signifyd or NoFraud offer more precise fraud detection, reducing false declines and maintaining customer trust by using advanced machine learning algorithms. 
• Multiple payment methods: Incorporate digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal to provide customers with more payment options.
• Streamline the checkout process: Simplify the steps required to complete a purchase by enabling guest checkouts and removing unnecessary fields. Bold Checkout, for example, offers customizable solutions that can help reduce cart abandonment and boost conversions.
• Real-time payment analytics: Solutions like ReCharge and Klarna provide real-time insights into payment trends, helping you anticipate and resolve potential issues quickly. 
• Recover lost revenue with AI: Bounce reduces false declines and enhances payment experiences using cutting-edge machine learning technology.

While these strategies are effective, they often lack a comprehensive solution that integrates false credit card decline analysis with data-supported insights into a single platform. That’s where Bounce’s new Shopify app comes in—with its Payment Health Analysis.

Now, with our new Shopify app, we go beyond optimization and enable data-driven insights from real payment date

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Meet Bounce: data-driven Shopify app

We are excited to introduce Bounce’s new Shopify app, powered by advanced machine learning to help Shopify merchants:

• Optimize financial performance and uncover hidden revenue streams. Our app offers comprehensive analysis, providing:
• Real-time monitoring of your store’s payment health and performance. With data-driven revenue insights, the app helps you identify trends and optimize for greater profitability. App also focuses on loss prevention by detecting potential issues before they impact your bottom line, ensuring financial stability.
• A user-friendly dashboard, the app offers a no-code, customizable interface, making it easy to visualize key metrics and make informed decisions quickly.

Needless to say, our app is seamlessly integrated with Shopify, enhancing your checkout process without any disruption to your existing workflow. 

Gain a clear advantage with data-driven payment insights

With Bounce’s payments health analysis, your e-commerce business gains a competitive edge by turning data into actionable insights. The app offers a comprehensive view of your payment flow, including:

• Total transactions
• Total declined transactions
• Decline rate 
• Credit card type distribution 
• decline rate per credit card type 
• Customer retries breakdown
• Decline rate by nationality 
• Decline reason distribution
• Bounce potential
• Decline rate for a certain period 
• Geographical trends

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This allows you to pinpoint revenue-draining issues and uncover hidden opportunities. By monitoring payment trends, decline patterns, and customer behaviors in real time, you can optimize your checkout experience, reduce declines, and enhance revenue capture. This holistic approach not only improves financial performance but also equips you with the knowledge to make strategic, data-driven decisions that propel your business forward.

With proven results, Bounce will bring in the best position for the e-commerce high season. Explore our new app on the Shopify App Store today.

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While it's common to monitor metrics like cart abandonment rates, assessing your card decline ratio is often overlooked.

Interestingly, research shows that up to 50% of card declines are associated with valid transactions, representing significant revenue losses. These declines not only directly reduce your revenue but also adversely affect other critical KPIs such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Lifetime Value (LTV), retargeting costs, and retention rates.

Introducing Bounce’s hidden losses estimator! 

By utilizing our estimator, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your current card decline losses and their broader implications on your KPIs. In just a few steps, you will obtain valuable insights that can help you mitigate these losses and optimize your business performance.

The importance of tracking your card decline rate

While businesses frequently monitor cart abandonment ratios, the critical nature of tracking card decline rates often goes unnoticed. Payment acceptance rates might offer a glimpse into the captured revenue versus potential untapped revenue, but they don't fully illustrate the profound impact card declines have on overall business health.

Keeping a close eye on your card decline metric is crucial. Here’s why:

• Revenue recovery: Up to 50% of card declines are valid transactions, representing significant revenue loss. Addressing these can directly boost your bottom line.
•  Impact on marketing KPIs: Just about every marketing KPI is affected by conversion fails, including top-line impact, cost of acquisition (CAC), retargeting costs, lifetime value (LTV), and conversion-to-paid rate/monetization rate. By reducing decline rates, you can positively influence these metrics.
• Fraud detection: Sudden spikes in decline rates can indicate potential fraud. Early detection allows you to implement security measures, protecting your business from substantial losses.‍
• Informed strategy: Data on card declines provides insights into payment behaviors, guiding strategic decisions on payment options, fraud prevention, and customer engagement, ultimately driving business growth.

How to use Bounce’s hidden losses estimator

It’s easy as 1,2,3! 

Visit this link and enter your email address to get started. We’ll then ask you a bit about your business and what you sell (apps, books, cosmetics, cleaning supplies, household goods, legal services, etc). Choose what best describes your business and then pick out your primary market location. Write down your annual revenue from online sales. Write down the percentage of the revenue that comes from international sales. If you sell internationally, tell us where you sell (up to 5 countries) and let us know whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses. We’ll guide you through just a few more questions to get you to the finish line! There you’ll learn how much money you’re losing to card declines and how much can be saved. Trust us- you won’t believe the numbers! 

Staying vigilant in monitoring card decline rates is not just about improving payment processes; it's about securing your business's financial health and ensuring long-term growth. Start tracking today to unlock these benefits and drive your business forward.

Try out our hidden losses estimator now!