James Ambrose
May 24, 2019
How Custom Gateway Routing Can Improve Your Transaction Approval Rate
3 Easy Steps to Take Control of Your Subscription Billing
If you have been in the subscription business for a while you might be wondering how you can automate your billing to get more transactions approved. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Gateway Routing and why is it important?
Gateway routing is directing a transaction to a specific payment gateway. A payment gateway is the online equivalent to card swipe machines in stores. When a customer makes a transaction, a payment gateway is requested so that the transaction can be processed.
When talking about gateway accounts more is definitely… more. For starters, having more than one will help you protect your business in case your sole payment gateway stops working. But most importantly, each gateway is different and their performance varies depending on the details of your transactions. Setting up a strategy to select a specific gateway when a transaction meets certain conditions will allow you to increase your acceptance rate.
1. Listen To Your Business And Your Data
First of all, you’ll need to determine which factors are more important to your business. For example: which payment methods your customers use, which currencies do you accept, do you have only one-time-offers or recurring payments, etc…These factors will point you out to what you need to look for in a payment gateway. Find important tips here that will help you with your gateway research.
Then, try to dig deeper. Think of the payment process as described by David Goodale: “a chain of events, (where) there are several “handshakes” that must occur in order for a transaction to complete. If one of these parties in the chain is down, interrupted or unavailable during the transaction resolution, a problem will occur.”
Analyze your transaction data to find out which of the parties of your chain is causing a problem. This will give you more information on what to look for in your next gateway integration. And even more so, it’ll point you out to which criteria you should consider as the turning point for your routing strategy.
2. Routing Based On Criteria
These criteria will be the existing condition in a transaction that will route them to a more appropriate gateway.
Amongst the most common ones we found:
- Payment methods (credit, debit, digital wallet, etc.):
- Payment card brand
- Custom fields
- BIN number
- Countries and currencies
- Transaction amount
- Cardholder risk profile
Once you’ve figured out which of these parameters are lowering your approval rate, you can start taking action. Knowing which is the right gateway to pick for each of them is not that obvious when you’re starting. You might feel that your data is not big enough to help you make the perfect match. But don’t worry, you’re not alone on this.
3. Talk To The Experts
Our golden tip at this point is to contact the customer service of your billing software. Routing has become an important strategy for most businesses and there is a lot of testing being made every day. Billing software companies handle vast data about gateways performance.
The best thing is that they’ll be happy to share that data with you to help you succeed. Customer satisfaction has become a core value for most SaaS companies. They’ll know the importance of helping you get the most value from their product, ultimately that’s their purpose too.
Custom routing is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship with automation. Once you start with these simple steps, you’ll want to keep going. And there’s a whole world of possibilities offered by some billing software. Talk to yours and start getting more profit out of every transaction.
What automation tool has made an impact on your business?
