E-commerce KPIs and metrics that help reduce failed payments

Failed payments drain revenue and weaken the customer experience. They trigger abandonment, extra support workload, and chargebacks that add cost. The most reliable way to cut failure rates is to track the right e-commerce KPIs and use them to spot patterns. You will see where the checkout process slows, which decline codes dominate, and how retry logic performs. This article sets out the important KPIs and metrics and shows how to apply them in an e-commerce business.

Why e-commerce KPIs matter for revenue

You cannot fix what you cannot see. E-commerce KPIs give you a shared language for performance benchmarking, early issue detection, and strategy choices that scale. When you measure authorisation quality, checkout latency, and decline reasons, you can improve conversion rate, protect customer satisfaction, and control fraud losses.

Personalised experiences link to higher conversion. Statista reports that 63% of professionals saw a conversion rate gain from personalisation. That strengthens the case for measuring conversion rate alongside sales KPIs to validate what changes actually work.

Fraud costs keep rising, which makes tracking payment success rate and chargeback rate more important. Industry estimates reported losses of about USD 44.3 billion in 2024 and a forecast of over USD 100 billion by 2029.

Recurring payments face higher risk than one-off orders. Industry data suggests global authorisation declines average around 17%, and subscription or recurring payments can reach up to 30%. That is a clear signal to monitor retries and dunning flows separately from first-time purchases.

Customer loyalty is also at stake. 62% of customers do not return after a single failed transaction. Keep this in mind when setting response targets and incident priorities.

Essential e-commerce KPIs for reducing failed payments

How to track and analyse e-commerce KPIs

Set up your data flow

• Use your payment processor dashboard for authorisation rate, payment success rate, decline codes, checkout latency, and chargebacks.
  
  
• Use your commerce platform for conversion rate, AOV, and refund data.
  
  
• Use an analytics tool for funnel steps, bounce rate, and high bounce rate pages.
  
  
• For subscriptions, use your billing tool for retry schedules, churn rate, and renewal cohorts.

Set a regular schedule

• Daily: payment success rate, authorisation rate, checkout error rate, and latency.
  
  
• Weekly: decline code breakdowns with issuer trends, retry recovery rate, and cart abandonment rate.
  
  
• Monthly: refund and chargeback rate, average amount by method, CLV, and sales KPIs by segment.

Segment everything

Look at results by country, currency, BIN, issuer, scheme, payment method, device, browser, and time of day. Separate one-off purchases from recurring billing so you can see where involuntary churn rises.

Automate your reporting

If you handle high volumes, use APIs to feed a lightweight dashboard. Use APIs to feed data into a simple dashboard and set up alerts for red flags—like authorisation rates suddenly dropping, checkout pages loading too slowly, or a specific error code spiking.

Optimise checkout

Make sure forms are short, mobile-friendly, and have built-in error checks. Features like autofill and address suggestions make the process faster and cut down on mistakes. Research shows that smoother mobile checkouts lead to fewer errors and more completed purchases.

Improvement tips and best practices

Reduce declines

Route transactions by market, issuer, and method to improve approval quality. Keep credentials current with account updater services. Treat recurring payments as a separate stream and design a retry ladder that varies the day, time, and amount within sensible limits. Use domestic processing for cross‑border traffic where possible.

Lower errors

Keep forms short and mobile-friendly. Use clear field validation and straightforward error copy. Add address autocomplete to reduce input mistakes. Make the checkout process resilient to weak networks and cache key assets so pages load quickly.

Recover revenue

For soft declines, space retries in line with issuer behaviour and cap the count to protect experience. For subscriptions, pair retries with account updater and a short reminder before renewal. Track retry recovery rate as a first‑class KPI and compare ladders by cohort.

Manage fraud without harming conversion

Use risk scoring to focus step‑up checks where risk is high. Apply strong customer authentication when liability shift or issuer preference requires it. Watch chargeback rate and refund rate together, read top reason codes, and tune rules by market and method.

Protect loyalty through speed and reliability

Aim for quick, consistent responses and keep end‑to‑end latency under five seconds. Prioritise incidents on the payment step. Add clear on‑page guidance when a payment fails and offer simple recovery options such as one‑click retry links or saved payment methods.

Conclusion

Lowering failed payments comes down to clarity and consistency. When you track the right metrics and act on what they tell you, problems stop slipping through the cracks. Authorisation rates, checkout performance, and recovery data are signals that show you exactly where to make changes for smoother payments and a better customer experience.

Antom helps make that process easier. With tools like Revenue Booster, Combined Payment, and real-time dashboards, you can monitor, adapt, and optimise your payment flow without adding extra complexity. And because Antom supports multiple regions and over 300 payment methods, you can give your customers a frictionless experience no matter where they are.