Note: This page is intended for the people and partners of Individual Restaurants. It is not intended for public consumption.

Please do not share this page with guests.

Payment failures are an epidemic in eCommerce. The architecture of the card processing tunnel was designed for the pre-Internet era. The system was not built for CNP, and doesn't work well for CNP transactions. But unfortunately such failures are largely unavoidable in eCommerce because of the nature of the systems involved (everyone uses the same systems to transact, and so we must do so also, accepting the pitfalls in order to participate). There will always be a percentage of transactions that fail (1-3 out of 10 online transactions will fail).

• 15-20% of all card transactions in eCommerce are declined
• With recurring charges, 32% of total transactions across all industries are declined
• A vast majority of all declined transactions are unrelated to security/fraud
• A majority of fraud or security related declines are legitimate transactions that should not have been flagged as fraud ("false positives")
• All online transactions pass through at least six (6) different third parties off-platform. All steps of this payment chain must be functioning correctly, and agree, for a payment to be successful.
• The most likely issues for a failed transaction are customer input error, incompatible card (not 3D Secure), poor connection to the internet or guest authentication failure (where the guest doesn't pass though their banks security authentication process).
• All focussed efforts to locate an issue with our implementation of the payment gateway have proven unsuccessful (as every time we test the system, it works) which indicates that there is not an issue our end, suggesting one of the above issues to be the cause of any failed transactions (ie outside of our control)
• It's important to note that guests can always contact their issuing bank to find out more information as to why a transaction failed (or indeed why it succeeded) at any time, for any transaction
• Guests can also check with their issuing bank that their card is enrolled in their corresponding 3D Secure programme.
  • Verified by Visa
  • MasterCard Securecode
  • American Express SafeKey
  • J/Secure by JCB International
  • ProtectBuy by Discover

<aside> 💡 Before you understand the nature of failed payments, its important to understand how the system works, particularly the enhanced security 3D Secure (verified by visa, mastercard and amex)

</aside>

How the payment system works

There are two parts of the online process we handle our side online;

1. the ordering phase (menu selection)

2. the checkout phase

The third part is handled by a number of third parties;