Back in April we wrote about declined transactions. Many declined transactions are easily understood; insufficient funds in an account, inaccurate input of the data. Many however, are not. They involve fraud filters and payment gateway idiosyncrasies. Local transactions vs international transactions. "False positives", as we sometimes refer to them, can cost a sale and/or result in a costly support call.
In this particular case it was a customer who had suffered from card testers (fraud) for a 48 hour period. Almost immediately they saw overall decline rates skyrocket - and stay that way for months. Someone somewhere turned on additional fraud filtering on this customer's account. They never told them and never turned it off. They ended up changing payment gateways; something that we make easy to do. However, they suffered for months prior to that switch. That didn't seem right or fair.
We realized there was a mountain of data to compare the price of payment gateways. However there was nothing to compare their performance. We wanted to do what we could to help payment gateways and our customers. However, as a startup, we needed more data than what we alone were seeing. On a trip to see Shopify over the summer they too were intrigued by this question of payment gateway performance. Shopify agreed to share pool their firehose of data and we were off to the races.
We hope you find it useful. We know you'll have feedback and we do intend to improve it as time goes on.