By Rob Simmonds, Enterprise Architect at Paydock
Payments Availability
As consumers, we tend to think that the structures and processes that enable us to buy anything at any time with any payment method are verging on infallible; that is until they do fail, and it lays bare our reliance on just a few key players in the market to ensure that we can buy our goods and services, either in person or online.
System outages can affect millions of consumers and thousands of businesses who become unable to make or receive payments for several hours while service is restored. While this kind of outage can be frustrating as a consumer, as a merchant, you might never get back the customers who tried to spend their money with you during your payments outage. And if you rely on this service as a consumer, you may face personal frustration if it is the only solution available.
According to research, online merchants lose 62% of customers who experience a failed online transaction.
Payment outages come in all sorts of sizes and flavours; In Australia, a recent outage by Osko was caused by a technical glitch in the New Payments Platform (NPP) at the Reserve Bank of Australia, and impacted all 85 of Australia’s banks.
Similarly earlier this year, an outage caused by a “scheduled software update” caused Mastercard transactions to be declined across the UK for several hours. And back in 2012, the Royal Bank of Scotland had a severe failure in upgrading its mainframe batch software, which caused weeks of payments delays for upwards of 6 million of its customers.
It’s not just wide-scale outages that can cause pain – there are many steps between your customer opting to buy something from your website, and the funds arriving in your account. If your particular payments provider, or one of the myriad of other components in the payments chain has an outage, what do you do?
Mitigating the risk with Payments Orchestration
This is where payments orchestration with Paydock comes in. Paydock’s unique and dynamic routing engine technology can be configured to intelligently route payments via alternative gateways based upon gateway availability, allowing your business to weather the storm of a payment gateway or network outage and result in higher payment success rates and reducing cart abandonment.
By supporting multiple payment methods directly in the shopping cart, Paydock helps facilitate a failover process offering alternative routes to payment, meaning that a payments outage doesn’t mean you have a business outage.
Whilst outages and downtime may be inevitable, Paydock and payment orchestrators like us allow routing by service, card type, currency, payment type and gateway availability, providing you with the capability to offer your customers alternative payment options to ensure they can still buy what they want, when they want; and most importantly, from you – even if (we mean when) things go wrong.
Learn more about Paydock’s Routing Engine in our demo video below!
Want to find out how Paydock can reduce the risk to your business? Get in touch today with one of our payments experts at [email protected]
