Stripe failed payment statistics (decline rate)
I asked the same question from Stripe support and received a surprisingly dumb reply, so I thought I'd try my luck here:
What's the standard card decline rate you're getting with Stripe?
I did some math for the last 13 months and this is what I got:
- 206 failed payments vs. 924 successful ones. i.e.: 206/(206+924)×100 = an error rate of 18%!
- FYI, here's the breakdown for failures:
- 103 x
do_not_honor - 37 x
transaction_not_allowed - 34 x
insufficient_funds - 12 x
expired_card-- not during order. - 10 x "Stripe blocked this payment as too risky." -- but what's the error code for this?! Not covered in the docs.
- 9 x
incorrect_number-- not during order. - 1 x
processing_error - (
expired_cardandincorrect_numberdo not occur during checkout, only occurs for recurring payments.)
- 103 x
I think that's really high… but have no point of comparison.
FYI, on my order form, after asking for their e-mail address, I only ask for their credit card details. My reasoning is that the less info is required, the more people complete the checkout process.
However, I'm wondering what sort of an impact asking for more details (e.g.: the card holder's name) would have.
Bottom-line… Would folks mind sharing?
What's your card decline rate on Stripe? (%)
Thanks a bunch!
Fabien
The decline rates I've seen across different SaaS contexts:
What matters more than the raw decline rate is recovery rate — how many of those failures turn into retained customers vs. silent churn.
Industry average recovery (with a proper dunning sequence): 30-60% of failed invoices recovered. Without any outreach: <10%.
The gap between those two numbers is where most Micro SaaS founders quietly lose money.
Anyone tracking their actual recovery rate? Curious what you're seeing.
Hi Fabien, are you doing some sort of trial with your product? There was recently a discussion in SaaS Growth Hacks (FB Group) where one person was mentioning that almost all prepaid cards failed.
The reason is when people signup for trials, they normally use a pre-paid card without funds, these days you can get a visa gift card from anywhere, and also most bank accounts here in Europe let you generate random pre-paid cards for internet without funds.
There are different approaches to fix this, like doing pre-authorizations, charging upfront, not accepting prepaid cards, etc.
If you are not doing trials, then yes, maybe you should ask for more information.
I'm also using Stripe, and asking users to fill up the name, street, postal code and city/country.
Hey Ariel, Thanks for posting.
Not doing any trial. People are paying for the real thing.
Most customers are overseas, which explains some of the card declines, though unclear how many.
The best-seller is "high-price" (about €300) and I read this may play into the mix, too.
Still curious what decline rate people are getting.
With PayPal, the information wasn't available. While with Stripe, you only get it if you take the time to do the math for yourself.
oh ok, yes for me an 18% error rate is also too high if people are really trying to pay, I'm thinking about switching to chargebee or recurly to allow more than one payment method, this could be a possible solution for you as well
One good strategy is to push for annual plans which I will be doing.
I rather give a discount and get someone on an annual plan than suffer with them churning after a few months due to credit card failure...
Most of my sales are actually annual (makes for a more stable business.) One could argue that it increases the rate of bank declines though (bank being more suspicious of high-price transactions)…
im create stripe always confrim credit card,, whathappen? whatswrong ?
stripe suck now ?
Not much different for me, huge number of do_not_honor failures and about 50% of the failures are from existing cards that have had multiple successful monthly payments and all of a sudden it fails.
It creates such a bad customer experience as we have to email them begging to call their bank which they will never do.
I ended up integrating Paypal even though its a nightmare...
I don't understand why a card that has had multiple successful transactions over several months can suddenly have a do_not_honor code...
do_not_honoris the generic decline code, so if the bank's API is lacking in details it may hide the fact it's in reality an expired card, or maybe the customer renewed their card, or maybe they just unauthorized the payment with the bank instead of with the business.i've just done some hunting around and yes you are right, it is a generic code if no details are available. They say majority of the do_not_honor codes are due to insufficient funds in the account.
for the past month I've had 362 customers and 309 successful payments, which is 15% failure. Some customers email me afterward and pay via paypal. I'm definitely going to have to add paypal as a payment option, despite their terrible api.
Ah, finally! Someone sharing stats! THANK YOU! :D
Out of curiosity, which details do you ask for during payment?
What I did yesterday is I translated all of the Stripe error messages (most of my customers are French) and added a call-to-action to explain what they should do. e.g.: check their bank balance, call their bank… because often time if they call their bank the bank can unlock it and it'll work when they try again. We'll see how much it helps.
With PayPal, on top of the terrible API, is how difficult it makes accounting. Their reporting interface sucks and the exports are no better.
I only ask for email. When an error occurs I just have a popup with an explanation, as well as an offer to manually process the charge with paypal
Had the same decline rate with Stripe, migrated to PayPal and now happy. BTW LinkedIn (330 mil users) uses PP for subscriptions. Something wrong with Stripe cause you wouldn be able to find/search any clear answer WHY the decline rate is so hight.
Stripe's customer support on the topic ("Normal Fail Rate") was so bad, I thought I was dealing with PayPal! Which makes me wonder how they'll scale in terms of support.
The thing with PayPal is you don't know the decline rate at all because they don't show you that information. So the only way to compare both is by comparing final sales and/or the amount of support that payment issues generate for you.
The more info you require, better your chances will be of getting quality cards on file. A lot of people use prepaid/debit cards that don't have any balance on them. So they technically work during trial signup but then when time comes to actually run the payment, those cards fail. Most do_not_honor or insufficient_funds happen on prepaid/debit cards.
You can do a few things:
The higher the barrier to entry, the more quality you will get but that will technically reduce the total number of signups. So you have to figure out the balance.
Hello
With Bitcoin, I'm not experiencing this problem
Alex
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
This comment was deleted 7 years ago