Payment Failure Cascading

Re-attempt failed customer transactions to save checkouts

Merchants with more than one payment gateway may wish to support cascading - ie. the immediate re-attempt of a failed bankcard transaction at checkout onto a secondary gateway.

Automatic Re-Attempt Flow

From the Payments Settings follow the following steps to set up decline re-attempts:

• Create a new Gateway Group to use for re-attempting declined charges

• Add one or more gateways to the group to use for charge re-attempts

• From the Gateway Details View, under Payment Flow select the box "Re-attempt declined initial charge attempts"

• Specify the Gateway Group you created

• Click Save Changes

When this setting is enabled, declined bankcard transactions will re-attempt one time only if the initial transaction attempt's decline reason code is one of the following:

• 2000 - Do Not Honor

• 2003 - Processor Declined

• 2004 - Authorization Required

• 2005 - Processing Error

• 3007 - Invalid Card

• 3011 - Merchant Error

Manual Re-Attempt Flow

Developers wishing to customize their decline re-attempt logic should use the following logic in their application.

Note: Re-attempting payment failures is not recommended for Hard Decline reasons are returned in an initial response. Only Soft Declines are likely to approve upon re-attempt. Your application should parse the Transaction Response Code to decide whether a charge should be re-attempted.

1. Upon a failed payment transaction, a card_token is returned in the API response:

{
  "payment_details": "Unable to process the purchase transaction.",
  "payment_response_code": "2000",
  "payment_method": {
     "card_token:"1hSk5wZmkCtgaC3TOtahuV6Z2R", 
    }
}

1. To create a secondary payment attempt (the "cascade" attempt after an initial failure), the transaction request must use payment_method: "card_token" and pass the card_token from the initial response.

"payment_method": "card_token",
"payment_details": {
   "card_token": "1hSk5wZmkCtgaC3TOtahuV6Z2R",
   "payment_gateway": <gateway_id>
}

On this secondary attempt using the card token, specify under payment_details an alternate payment_gateway to re-attempt the failed charge on the designated secondary gateway.

💳Payments Guide