The Sorry Six: Payment Processors with the Lowest Success Rates
How did your payment processor do last month?
Most companies will cite a 95% success rate in processing payments, according to payment gateway Spreedly, but the company’s data does not support this.
Far from it.
Spreedly has been tracking the success rate of its payment processors since last August — the service began just a year ago, in March 2013 — and unfortunately, some of those processors fell 20% to 30% below that 95% number.
Here are the six worst-performing payment processors from Spreedly’s GatewayIndex for January and February 2014:
| Rank – Feb ’14 | Processor | Feb ’14 Success Rate | Jan ’14 Success Rate |
| 1 | Wirecard | 71% | 74% |
| 2 | Authorize.net | 75% | 70% |
| 3 | Garanti | 76% | 73% |
| 4 | Paymill | 76% | 77% |
| 5 | Ogone | 79% | 76% |
| 6 | WorldPay | 79% | 78% |
A 70% success rate, to be clear, means 3 out of 10 transactions fail. That’s not good. Litle & Company, a Vantiv company, was a standout, with a 96% success rate both months, leading all processors. SecurePay and Balanced also had 96% success rates in February. In January, PayPal‘s success rate in January sank to 64%, worst in the ranking. It improved to 85% in February.
Spreedly began life as a subscription service for media sites in December 2012, but soon pivoted to become a cloud-based vault for payment credentials. A user of a site that uses two different payment gateways (for sales in two different countries, for example) can then use the same stored payment information for both. Spreedly itself does not process payments — it allows developers to choose which payment processor they’d like to use when setting up with Spreedly.
Spreedly is based in Durham, N. C.
UPDATE: Spreedly and partner Shopify launched GatewayIndex Labs today, to allow users to use the data in new and creative ways.
