Optimizing Acceptance Rates

Ran Cohen: Hello everyone.

Nir Bitton: Hey everyone. Thank you for joining us. Hey Ran, thank you for being here.

Ran Cohen: Good to be here.

Nir Bitton: Yes. How are you?

Ran Cohen: I love this studio feeling.

Nir Bitton: I have to say that we built a beautiful room for the webinars.

Ran Cohen:  

Yeah. Good job here.

Nir Bitton: Indeed. So what are we going to speak about today?

Ran Cohen: I'm going to speak about the acceptance rates.

Nir Bitton: Right and approval ratio, basically in other words. So the topic for this webinar today is acceptance rate and how we can improve them. What is how we can improve it? And what is the expected outcome basically? Anything else to say before we jump into it? 

Ran Cohen: Yeah, we're gonna have to say a lot about it during the event. It's an event we waited for and planned. And we have a lot to say about and obviously, we'd be happy to hear from you guys. Any questions or any issues or any comments, you have to say about acceptance rates, things that happen to you guys in your processing experience. And also, I think we should give a few more minutes to people to come in.

Nir Bitton: Yeah actually, you're right. I think it's worth mentioning that guys we have a poll, which will be very happy if you could answer the questions in the poll. And also, do not hesitate to ask us whatever question you want. And I can think about it. We can answer questions that are relevant to the topic. So please do not hesitate to ask us whatever you want.

Ran Cohen: Building a company in Cyprus, which is a FinTech SAAS company in Cyprus is not let's say the most obvious thing to do. So from one side there are many challenges and from the other side a lot of advantages because you're very unique in the view.

Nir Bitton: To attract better employees.

Ran Cohen: To attract talents and also to be close to different places. So it has its pros and cons for sure. And maybe it's another lesson topic.

Nir Bitton: Sure.

Ran Cohen: Big topic acceptance rates again. If any of you joined us now, first of all, happy to have you here. We have the questions and the chat tool inside the event so if you have any questions or comments...... and that occurred to you in the past even if it's in work life or private life. We want to hear about that and then see how they fit into the story of acceptance rates.

Nir Bitton: I think one of the special things about our topic today is that it doesn't necessarily have to do something with a specific industry. Kind of thing doesn't matter which industry if it's ecommerce, gaming, traveling, whatever it is, you can always improve your acceptance rate.

Ran Cohen: Of course acceptance rate is when you pay your phone bill or electricity bill.

Nir Bitton: Purchasing online,

Ran Cohen: Purchasing anything that you purchase online. Paying anything you're billed for something so in the end, the experience you get when you get this decline is something that you remember. But the nature of us has, what happened? How can it be? We have to try again. We have to see what's wrong and we maybe will go someplace else and see if the (Inaudible) or this place is not good for me because I got this decline. So yeah, acceptance rates are everywhere.

Nir Bitton: Yes. So shall we? First, why should we optimize our acceptance rates? In other words, our conversion ratio? This is a question for the core of the business I think.

Ran Cohen: It's a question to anyone that walks in the business because in the end, you're the business owner. You obviously want to optimize the revenues of your business go without saying you don't sleep at night, because you think about how you do it and you have the employees that are actually doing it. So it's a headache for both, it's just on different levels and definitely the employees feel the pressure of the optimization that comes from the owners. And the answers are supposed to come from them as well. So it's a shell thing. And I think it's cost the organization because anyone in the organization would want to have the impact on the revenues without changing the expenses. And this is why acceptance rate is so important. It's important from the revenue side. It's important from the user experience side from the user feedback side. 

Nir Bitton: This is a topic I want to dive into a bit later today about the user experience of the acceptance rate because it is a major thing.

Ran Cohen: It is a major thing. The lack of confidence you got, once you've got this decline on the website you're buying the product on is huge. You say to yourself, Wait, I'll go buy on other websites that I've used to buy myself. That knows my cards, it knows me so you just lost this transaction to another agent is going to eat from your revenues. Not only you lost the transaction, you lost now revenues from a sale that reseller will do. So it's important in all the flow of the user payment experience and flow. Because even if the transaction was declined, you're risking here, not only losing this revenue, or risking losing more revenues because you would need to show.

Nir Bitton: I want to speak about in this slide, we can see, of course everything it has to do with the growth of your business. But from one side, you can see the acceptance rate and from the other side you can see the cart abandonment rate. Can you please tell me a bit more about those two parameters inside your growth.

Ran Cohen: Well, you want to increase your acceptance rates, you want to decrease your cart abandonment rate. That's the two pillars of growth of a business that does not involve a change in your cells, in your marketing, in your structure, in the expenses you have in your company. It's two pillars that can bring a huge impact on business revenues. If you treat both of them in the right way, you increase the acceptance rates, you reduce cart abandonment rate. You make clients pay more and complete transactions and yeah that's the way to grow.

Nir Bitton: I think that one thing here's a fact that I chipped up on the web. At around 70% Speaking about ecommerce writers, about 70% of the shopping carts have been abandoned. So you have just like 30% to save to make your business and you cannot accept, you have a lower acceptance rate. So you're left with 30% of the business. And now you can think about it. Like what would happen if you lose like 10% 20% of the 30%?

Ran Cohen: So you're saying what 30% are leaving your checkout?

Nir Bitton: To the checkout trying to buy from you.

Ran Cohen: And completing?

Nir Bitton: If you would have an improved acceptance rate. Yeah.

Ran Cohen : And where is the 70% going?

Nir Bitton: On the card abandoned.

Ran Cohen: So what we saw in Bridger is that when you connect the right payment method to the right client in the right region, the cart abandonment rate average in Bridger clients is today around 7%

Nir Bitton: Crazy. It's crazy.

Ran Cohen: It's 7, not 70. So it's all a method or the right formation of payment method. If you listen to your clients well, if you get this feedback from them, what do they want to pay with, the abandonment will be gone. And obviously, if you solve a lot of technical problems on checkout, which we spoke about in previous lessons, then you reduce the ........ and see how we make this pillar grow without changing anything in our business.

Nir Bitton: Alright. So what are acceptance rates?

Ran Cohen: Support transaction and decline transaction 

Nir Bitton: As simple as that. But basically, here's something I want to raise here. Acceptance rate basically has nothing to do with your website or your buyer in your website. So you can have the best flow in your website, the best UX UI, the best products, the best prices, and the client can really really want to buy from you. And basically acceptance rate. If you're thinking about it, it doesn't depend on you or your client

Ran Cohen: Of course, if you take this. First of all, the definition in terms of acceptance rate is the amount of transactions that managed to be approved from the total amount of transactions. So, the transparency on the total amount of overproof transactions, the total amount of declined transactions that you have is the basic way to start the baseline of calculation of your acceptance rates. Now once you know exactly how many approved transactions you have. Exactly how many declined transactions you have, then you start breaking down per country. So acceptance rates between one country to another country will be completely different. You want to start optimizing well, your biggest guppies, so you want to optimize well, your acceptance rate is the lowest and your volume is the highest. So that's the most painful place for the business that you need to touch now. And that's what you want to make sure it's transparent to you. So you know where to go and where to start with and then okay, we're going to speak about how to do it later on.

Nir Bitton: But to just give a small topic to this, in other words, basically acceptance rate has nothing to do with you or your client. So it's 100% dependent on a third party.

Ran Cohen: You have the most amazing product, the most amazing website, everything works beautifully. Your client from India and your acquirer does not give your card and does not accept any transaction that comes from acquires out of India, you will be declined. As simple as that.

Nir Bitton: Alright, so speaking about three types of outcome from clicking pay now or buy now. So basically, you can either have your payment approved or you can have your payment pending which I have a great story about. All right. And you can have your payment declined.

Ran Cohen: First of all, let's put the light on the thing. There is such a thing that is called Payment Pending. This is something that merchants sometimes have this lack of understanding of what is a payment pending. But businesses are connected to payment providers and those payment providers have different types of technology behind them, they are connected to acquirers all around the world................ And he's making a transaction on our website. The transaction is being sent to the payment provider. And the payment provider is now waiting for the acquirer behind to give him the approved decline, so that he will get the signal from the issuer. I issue the client, yes, the client has the money in the account, you can take it. This whole process takes time. Most of the providers, most of the global acquirers know how to do it in less than a second, in milliseconds. And some providers in some countries are having trouble connecting to the end acquirers to be ambitious. And this transaction takes time to get approved. This time could be 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 40 minutes, 3 hours. Right? We saw many cases in Bridger with many, many different providers. And the transaction would remain pending for three hours. The merchant would call us and tell us what to say to the client and say we don't know. We let's go to the payment provider, the payment provider, I don't know I'm waiting for an answer. And everybody's just waiting. And we are in 2021. Everybody's waiting for an answer. And, and this is obviously something or a situation business cannot afford. You cannot afford it to your clients, you cannot tell your clients, please wait 40 minutes will let you know,

Nir Bitton: (Inaudible) other business like the worst client experience you can have as a client.

Ran Cohen: So when the business you pay, doesn't even see the money that you paid. You see your credit card statement that you pay, but the merchant doesn't have this transaction anywhere because it wasn't approved.

Nir Bitton: And also not you necessarily have it as a proof transaction.

Ran Cohen: Of course. So the whole circle is lacking communication at that point, anything can happen. The merchant can be Charged. The payment provider hasn't yet approved the transaction and the merchant still doesn't know that the transaction was approved and that he needs to send the goods. It can be in all the circles. And the way to minimize it is first of all to be transparent to payment providers that take this type of process. Also, if you're adding a payment method that it's inherited, inside the payment method, we have a payment method in Bridger that is connected in Brazil and Chile and Peru and Argentina. We're sending clients to pay for the shelves they are buying or the grocery, in the pharmacy in cash. So the guy needs to get out of his home now and go to a pharmacy. Only then will we get the approved transaction. So it really depends on which region it goes to in the world. You cannot eliminate it totally. But you need to be aware.

Nir Bitton: Yeah, definitely. So speaking about pending transactions. So I have this good friend that I think is now one of our audience here, who actually told me a few years ago the story and yesterday I told him can you refresh my mind about what actually happened? So here's the case. It was sometime in November when you had all these hoaxes on the website and everything on the web.

Ran Cohen: Black Friday

Nir Bitton: Yes, one of those days I remember and he went to a website which you didn't know before. And he was trying to purchase speakers for like $25 for a speaker and he was inserting his credit card details clicking on pay now and the screen was processing and just like 0404 page like nowhere. And then he went back to the website and inserted the credit card details processing nothing happened. On the 9th 10 times he used his wife's credit card details and by the way, all this process happens when you actually look in the history. If you actually purchase there's nothing, that's purchases in the store, there's nothing to appear. On the 10th time he took his wife's credit card, put the credit card inside the website and boom got to be, your purchase has been completed. You got it. The day after he got back to the website. And............. I think till now I have one of them because he had basically tensed. So I didn't know what to do with them. So I just shared it with my friends. So this is what pending can do to you basically.

Ran Cohen: So what happened here. Let's dive in. He made the transaction he got the fall for. The transaction went to the payment provider, the payment Provider because the integration to the payment provider was such that if I'm not getting an approved decline return me an error boom. I got an error, in the meantime the transaction went to the payment provider. Payment provider got the transaction, more time to do it. Until he did it right. He had a late decline. The late approval. The late approval was transmitted to the merchant that wasn't hearing it, because he already declined it right? So now you have a payment provider that got approved and sent their approval to the merchant. The merchant say okay, I got great approval. Let's make an order for the client, the order was created after your friend already finished his 10 transactions, only then they started coming into the system, when the callbacks of the approval came in from the payment provider. And he was billed and there was something different for sure between his credit card and his wife's credit card. Maybe he can tell us but there must be something different because if you didn't finish the transaction with this credit card, there must be something different. Could be from another bank. If it's only issued from another bank. He is in one bank, she's in another bank. That's enough for it to be approve the

Nir Bitton: Like different banks can be the reason for this...

Ran Cohen: Different issues of banks that could take longer to respond.

Nir Bitton: All right. All right.

Ran Cohen: Yes, if there are any questions, you are still quiet.

Nir Bitton: I agree.

Ran Cohen: And we also have some answers to oppose let's see. Yes, we do. We have 63% that are using between 3 to 5 payment providers.

Nir Bitton: Which is nice to see.

Ran Cohen: The rest is using between 1 to 2.

Nir Bitton: The percentage of how many people experience failed transactions. Yeah, you want to spend money but they don't let you.

Ran Cohen: And I would like to know if any one of you. I can see that. Yeah, most of them are experiencing failed transactions and are using more than 3 to 5 payment providers. But I would like to know, how are you optimizing it? Are you optimizing it today manually or through a platform? Or a gateway that allows you to do that?

Nir Bitton: Or in other words, with or without risk?

Ran Cohen : Yeah.

Nir Bitton: Okay. So speaking of risk. There are basically two ways to optimize your acceptance rate. One is with risk, and the other one is without risk. So let's focus obviously, first of all on the risks. What does it mean? How can you risk more than you already risk?

Ran Cohen: How do you optimize the acceptance rates manually? So you have a checkout that is connected to a payment provider. And that's your stuck. That's your payment stuck. You want to optimize your acceptance rates. Let's say you measured your acceptance rates as of today in different countries, you see that. Like we said before, you have lower acceptance rates in Brazil, with high volume. With a very nice volume that you would definitely want to have more of it, if you had more acceptance rates. So what do you do? You connect another payment provider, and then what? You need to decide who is going to operate and who is going to process the next transaction.

Nir Bitton: Let's assume that the first PSP you had was his acceptance rate was around 80%. All right, now you have connected the second PSP without any smart mechanism.......

Ran Cohen: You took down the first PSP you uploaded the new PSP to your prod environment and now you have a new payment provider processing your Brazil transactions. This payment provider promised you the world doing 95% 98% approval ratio across the world, which does not ever exist. And you believed, and you took him and you edited him and you took down 80% That you got. So for every 100 transactions, 80 transactions were approved. And you have 20 declines that you know that were declined. We'll talk later about which type of decline. So what do you do to come down, you added the new payment provider and now this new payment provider, they promise you 95, giving you 75. You lost. You lost what? You lost 5% on the volume of Brazil. You wanted to optimize the volume, you not only didn't optimize your volume, you lost money now. You actually lost money, you are still using the same cells in marketing campaigns and budgets etc. But you have now lost money and you took a risk, and you can try different combinations or different payment providers, but you will always be at risk.

Nir Bitton : But the risk is always on you because you don't have any optimization to this process. Because you either take one and replace it with another one, no one promises or maybe the PSP promises you but no one you know that. Right? Are you dependable?

Ran Cohen: Let's talk about the sample. How long does it take you to know? One day? One week? two weeks? How do you know?

Nir Bitton: Do you have the data?

Ran Cohen: No, you need to know. You had this payment provider in 80% all your life. Now you changed him to a new guy, this new guy is giving you 75%, when do you stop? You're now in a position where you chose something, you're the flagon of that decision. It's like trading, you're in love with opposition? You will say no, it will be better, it will be better, it will be better. So that's the risk part and you want to minimize it. And to minimize it, you need to walk with a payment operation or payment orchestration or payment gateway that allows you to connect multiple payment providers that allows you to retry a payment provider one to the other. Which means you're not now connecting another payment provider that is giving you a 75% and you are on 75%. Let's say that you lost the 5% like we said before, when you work with an operating platform, let's say you put on PSP one, the 75%. But you added as a fallback, okay, you're 80% on the deck.

Nir Bitton: So in other words, you promise yourself at least 80%. At least. And if you can get a third. 

Ran Cohen: So this is where we all start optimizing. So if you failed on the first, and you successfully got someone better on the third, you made the 85. So it doesn't matter how you play with it actually. It is just to have the right fallbacks within the route. And obviously the one that gives you the highest approval ratio should be the first. There is no reason for you to transfer transactions that do not need to be transferred to another payment provider. So this is what we've built in Bridger. A way to add multiple payment methods, all providers under the same route behind the same payment page. And then first of all, we are eliminating risk. We are allowing optimization risk free and it's not only the optimization of the acceptance rate, it's also the optimization of the commercial rates. So let's say PSP one and PSP two both are doing 80% But PSP one costs half a percent less. There are so many ways and so many combinations. And yeah.

Nir Bitton: What but you're just saying is like bring me to the thought that you're trying to have the same outcome from with risk and without risk if you want to have better acceptance rate. So let's say that you improved your acceptance rate from 80% to 90%. And this is like the first outcome you want to see actually from using a platform like (Inaudible) platform or (Inaudible) platform. It's actually worth to you as a business much more than to have the conversation with the PSP about like, let's say half percent improvement in your commercial agreement.

Ran Cohen: Obviously, with the retry mechanism that you have here is causing minimum 8% from what we see to 30% 35% increase in approval ratio due to save declines. So it's not comparable to changing your (Inaudible) from 3.2 or 2.9 to 2.8 or 2.7. And you are running after these commercials and you're getting exhausted on changing 0.1 where all you want is to show the business. I just got you 10% on revenues from Brazil on top or whatever we used to get without changing my sales and marketing expenses. That's the impact you want to create. Alright, let's see if people here has questions to ask us.

Nir Bitton: Waiting for some questions from you.

Ran Cohen: There's a chat on the right, the one if you can see. Good to have you here. And there's a chat tool on the right. So just press on it and ask us. And so you can ask us anything on the chat. We would really want to hear some decline, some acceptance rates, efforts you tried to do in your company maybe? Or that you are trying to do some challenges that you face today. And we'll be happy to answer.

Nir Bitton: Yes. So moving forward. Was the impact?

Ran Cohen: So we just said. So the differences, the difference you create in impact, the impact you create on changing the acceptance rate is a monthly change. So every month you added the business, another 10%. So it's 10% over the year on the year income in Brazil. So it's very important to say that it's not just a one time optimization, it's accumulative and throughout the year you are optimizing it so that 85 can go to 86 and 86 can go to 87. There is always a way to make it higher by connecting other payment methods and getting to the higher approval ratio. And obviously everything you generate is accumulating around the year throughout the year and that's your impact on the business and its big num

Nir Bitton: So let's share a little bit on a Bridger product. I know that you see my screen.

Nir Bitton: Yeah. Okay, so basically what we're about to see is how to improve your acceptance rate.

Ran Cohen: What I'll show you is how we're doing it in Bridger and what we've built in Bridger when we saw this issue.

Ran Cohen: It was declined or you get declined reasons which are completely not relevant or are not related to the invalid payment data you're not configured for this currency or why would I not configure it to the Dollar Currency. It's sometimes when we get declines we get very very weird decline reasons. Completely not related to if the client had money.

Ran Cohen: And a Japanese payment provider that didn't accept a transaction because the merchant, the client name was in Japanese.

Nir Bitton: No. They both were Japanese?

Ran Cohen: Yes.

Nir Bitton: Okay. How do you define the (Inaudible)

Ran Cohen: There are some African countries with some crazy letters. There's many cases. There's many cases but many, many different reasons. There's obviously all the downtown's that they have, and they just send you vague messages without really telling you what happened. So what we did in Bridger is first of all, understanding that there is a problem like that and understanding that there are declines that are not related to the fact that the client has money in his account or does not have money in his account. What we did is build a mechanism that allowed us to filter, it's a very advanced machine learning that knows exactly what payment declined reasons we should be trying, which we should not. And we then created the router. The router is what allows our merchants to build different sequences of payment providers according to different countries and have different payment logics in a country that they want to try to optimize. So as we said before, although we already have a Brazil route. In the Brazil route, we can see that we have three credit card options that we added another two alternative payment methods. Okay, we can easily add more payment methods to whatever our clients will see. The checkout will look like we will have one consolidated payment option of credit card and other alternative payment methods I chose. And the sequence of a transaction is determined by the merchant at every single point. So he can by drag and drop change the retry order and decide okay, now PayPal is going to get all the transaction fails, then pay you. And if I just want to pay you now or out of the business, I'm doing it in a click or adding any payment method.

Nir Bitton: That way that you're just showing us you promising yourself that the acceptance rate will be by the highest accepted by the highest PSP I mean. It's not an average, it's not the minimum, it's always the maximum. So let's say you have one PSP with 70%, one PSP with 80%, one PSP with 90%, it doesn't matter how you order them, it will always be 90%.

Ran Cohen: Exactly. Because if the first is your worst, it doesn't matter. Alright. And now let's say I add, I canceled the payment providers, I want to add new ones here, I want to add Stripe. I want to add Worldpay, I want to add another alternative payment method like Klarna, and I want to add them to the route of Brazil. And now I've created a new route with different payment providers that are enabled. And once I'm coming into my new route of Brazil, I will see my three payment providers enabled. If I want checkout to be first now I'm going to take it to be first. And what is going to actually happen in the transaction itself is that the transaction is going to start with the first payment provider that we placed, let's say checkout.com. And then we are going to get the decline and decline that of course you're going to easily understand. Declined by the payment system. Basically, it's very clear. And then we are going to WorldPay, which is telling us the card type enter is not currently supported. And what can we say visa is not supported. Very interesting. Then we go to zip that we actually haven't gone to because we filter them by a rule. We can also build different rules in Bridger to manipulate the route and say, transaction above this amount, take it out of the route logic and send it directly because I know that that's where I want to send.

Ran Cohen: So we can filter payment providers that are on the route by the rule and send it to the last one to get the transaction which in the end took the transaction and approved it. So the approval process is being done seamlessly. The retry process is done seamlessly behind the scenes. So in terms of the user, he sees the transaction is being processed in the meantime, I in milliseconds, we went to 4 3 payment providers and got the approval. The approval ratio of every payment provider is very transparent in Bridger and also the retry ratio, the amount of transactions we successfully approved after the decline. So you can also see the value that we brought to the business. So this is something that we put in front of us because it's obviously one of the biggest values that you can get here in Bridger and you want the clients to know and to see this well, and also be proud of their impact on the business they want.

Nir Bitton: So this is exactly the 10% we spoke about in acceptance rates, compared to the 0.5% you can get the better commercial (Inaudible) to your PSP, so this is exactly reflecting that.

Ran Cohen: Alright, maybe people have questions.

Nir Bitton: I think the topic is so clear.

Ran Cohen: Okay guys. We definitely thought there were going to be more questions. Okay, maybe it is clear.

Nir Bitton:I have a question for you Ran. Actually two questions. What is the expected outcome from improving your acceptance rate? And second question, what acceptance rate has to do with client experience?

Nir Bitton: So expected outcome, we can start with the fact that if you go with the formula to optimize the acceptance outcome, the acceptance optimization outcome, you want to start with the country where you have the highest decline ratio. Which or the lowest approval ratio, together with the amount of total transactions that are coming from that region from that country. So if you put the light and you start from there, it will give you a good place to later on do other stuff. So you show big acceptance rates, impact on the place where it's easiest to impact, and then later on other countries will just follow the same order or logic that you had, and will be optimized as well. So if the impact is, then the effect we're talking about depends on the business, right? It can be millions. We have businesses that the retry value on a monthly basis is above $5 million.

Nir Bitton: And what it has to do with client experience?

Ran Cohen: Well, you want to improve acceptance rates. You want to improve the people that will complete the transaction. So to do that, decrease your cart abandonment, because by decreasing cart abandonment, you're bringing more people into the process of either approval or decline. And to bring more people in the process will bring you more revenues and more sales. So you want to push more people inside. And if a business has, like you said, a 70% abandonment rate from his checkout. Yeah, that's definitely something you want to check. This is money, you lose. Money you lose on a daily basis. And I think you definitely want to get below that 10% as a goal. And to reach the point that over 90% of the people that want to start paying or to buy something that you're selling them, we'll at least try. We'll see if they get declined pending approval, maybe to a pharmacy.

Nir Bitton: Guys, any questions from home that you'd like to ask? If not, so.

Ran Cohen: So good explanation. Wow. Thank you, Alex.

Nir Bitton: All right. Well done. Thank you, Georgia. Well, guys, I think it's time to thank everyone. Thank you, Rony. Thank you for joining us.

Ran Cohen: It was really nice.

Nir Bitton: I enjoyed it very much. Yes, definitely. Maybe (Inaudible) have some questions. See you next time. Can't wait to see you.

Ran Cohen: So we have a few more events coming up. And we're also going to thank you Rich. We had Rich Thompson here from Riskified. Which by the way is an amazing amazing company that does beautiful service. Maybe we should ask Rich to join us for one of the future webinars. Tell us a little bit more about Riskified. And how we can also connect it together because I know and I can tell you from the inside that Riskified is a company that we're very much eager to start connect and have our merchants using their beautiful service that saves you a lot of money and headache. So yeah, we can definitely have Rich maybe joining us here in another event.

Nir Bitton: Good to have. Anyway, once again, Ran and everyone took part in this webinar. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure speaking with you about acceptance rate and see you in the next webinar.

Ran Cohen: Yeah, definitely. Thank you guys so much.