One line of text after a decline decides whether the shopper tries again
When a payment fails, the shopper gets a message, not a reason. What happens next depends on three things: what that message says, what the page still holds once it appears, and what it offers as the next step. All three are set by the webshop, and on many checkouts none of them has been designed.
The point is not new. In November 2021 PYMNTS published an interview, tied to its Checkout Conversion Index, with the chief operating officer of Checkout.com, who put retailers’ 2019 losses to false declines, valid purchases that were rejected, at more than $50 billion. The article gives no method for that estimate, so read it as an industry figure from a payments company rather than a measurement. The observation that came with it holds up better: a customer whose valid purchase is rejected generally does not try again. Whether they do depends largely on the screen they see.
The shopper cannot tell a typing error from a refusal
From the shopper’s side, three different events look the same. A digit was mistyped in the card number or the expiry date. The card was refused, for example because of the balance, a spending limit or a security check at the bank. Or something failed technically between the shop and the bank. Each calls for a different response: correct a field, use another card or method, or simply try again. A line such as “your payment could not be processed” fits all three and helps with none of them.
Baymard Institute’s checkout testing shows what that costs. In its article on adaptive error messages, published in December 2023, a participant who met a generic card error suspected there was not enough money in the account, when the actual problem was a small entry mistake. In its testing of European sites, unclear messages after a card decline were a common problem, and one participant said such a message could mean “absolutely anything”. Baymard describes generic messages as an issue that is not widespread but severe: many participants recovered, while those who could not work out what went wrong were almost certain to abandon the order. Its benchmark at the time found that 98% of sites did not tailor their error messages to the specific problem. Two years after the PYMNTS interview, the line a shopper read after an error was still generic on almost every site Baymard reviewed.
Split the message by cause. Entry errors can mostly be caught before the payment is sent: check the card number while it is typed, check the format of the expiry date and the length of the security code, and name the field that is wrong. A refusal does not need a reason, and you would not want to reveal a security rule, but it does need a plain statement that the card was not accepted, that the order is still open and what the shopper can do now. A technical failure should say so and invite a second attempt. Ask whoever built your payment integration which of these outcomes it can tell apart, and give each one its own message.
A second attempt starts from what the page kept
A shopper willing to try again then meets the state of the form. In an article published in February 2024, Baymard reports that 34% of the sites in its benchmark did not keep the card number after an error, including errors elsewhere on the page such as a mistyped phone number. In testing, the emptied field alone was enough for several participants to leave. Others were slow to recover, retyping the whole card number into an empty field instead of checking what they had entered, and some mistook the cause of the error and changed details that had been correct, until the errors piled up. On a phone the effect was worse.
Keep everything the shopper entered when any error occurs: basket, address, delivery choice and, where your set-up allows it, the card entry. Baymard points out that clearing card data after an error is one way sites stay within card security rules, and that a token from the payment provider lets a site keep the entry without holding the card number itself. A shopper who has to re-enter the whole order after a refusal is doing the checkout twice.
Put the next method on the same screen
A shopper whose card was refused will not succeed by typing the same card again. Baymard’s research on payment selection, published in September 2023, notes that some shoppers rely on other payment options as a fallback when their first method fails, and found that 21% of benchmarked sites offered no more than one method. In the same article, a 2023 Baymard survey of 2,219 US online shoppers found that 11% had abandoned a checkout in the previous three months because the site did not offer the payment option they wanted, and 6% because their credit card was rejected.
In the Netherlands the fallback is iDEAL, which Baymard’s own list of payment options to consider per country names for Dutch shoppers. Show that option directly below the message, without a page reload and without sending the shopper back to the start of the payment step. The same applies to every market you sell in: the alternative should be the method shoppers there use most.
The 2021 article’s wider argument was that friction builds up before the payment step, through delivery costs, slow pages and doubts about whether the shop can be trusted. That makes a decline the most expensive failure in the funnel, because the shopper who meets it has already cleared every earlier hurdle.
Run each failure on purpose this week. In your test environment, enter a wrong expiry date, use a test card that simulates a refusal, and cancel a bank approval halfway. For each case, write down the exact message, what the page still holds and which next step it offers. Then rewrite the messages so an entry error names the field, a refusal offers another method on the same screen, and a technical error invites a retry with the order intact.
Sources: pymnts.com, baymard.com, baymard.com and baymard.com
