Payment Optimization Tools to Improve Authorizations & Reduce Costs

Payment optimization is the process of improving how payments are routed and processed to increase approval rates, reduce costs, and enhance the user payment experience.

As international commerce grows, B2B cross-border payments are increasingly important as B2C payments, but functionally they often lag behind B2C payments in terms of customer experience, transaction speed, amount of manual effort required and more. B2B companies can close that gap, and see a 25% uptick in conversion rates, by choosing a payment processor optimized for cross-border transactions.

Payment routing data includes details like card type, issuing bank, currency, and transaction history. Using this data intelligently helps payment platforms optimize routing decisions, boost authorization rates, and lower transaction costs.

Traditional payment routing is a static process that connects to a single, regional acquiring bank. Even larger businesses that have access to multiple acquiring banks are limited by traditional payment routing as it always follows the same logic for every transaction. This can result in a higher number of declines.

Smart or Intelligent Payment Routing addresses these issues by identifying the most efficient route between available banks. It sends transactions for approval in the most optimal manner based on selected parameters. It is an essential payment processing feature for any business.

BlueSnap uses a variety of strategies to optimize payments, including:

• Intelligent payment routing through a global network of banks and acquirers
• Failover transactions to secondary acquiring banks if the first attempt fails
• Smart retry logic that reattempts failed transactions at the best possible time
• Local acquiring to reduce cross-border fees and increase approval rates
• Real-time analytics to identify and act on payment issues quickly

BlueSnap does all of this to help you increase your authorization rates and lower the costs associated with payments.

Yes. Presenting in local currency is when a merchant charges a customer in the currency local to them. Many merchants instead charge in the currency local to their business, which has negative impacts including:

• Higher cart abandonment due to the cardholder not knowing the final cost.
• Higher rate of declines from the cardholders’ banks due to perceived risk.
• Higher billing inquiries from cardholders confused by converted amounts on statements.
• Higher chargebacks from cardholders seeing a price they didn’t agree to on their statements.

By offering local currencies to your shoppers, you decrease the likelihood of cart abandonment, declined transactions and chargebacks.

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BlueSnap offers local acquiring in 50 countries. Local acquiring provides both lower cost and higher authorization rates. To take advantage of local acquiring, merchants may use existing legal entities or choose to open legal entities in regions where BlueSnap offers local acquiring.

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Card processing is categorized into levels, based on the amount of data required to process the transaction. Enhanced data levels like Level 2/3 require additional information to process the transaction. BlueSnap’s Payment API supports Level 2/3 data processing for all currencies, enabling you to expand your business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) sales opportunities.

Yes. BlueSnap supports partial captures for card transactions. To have this capability enabled, contact your Implementation Specialist or Merchant Support. For more details on how to perform partial captures, visit the Developer Hub.

You can view many card details using our Retrieve Card Info API Request.

We support full and partial refunds through the Merchant Portal or through the API.

Yes. BlueSnap’s Account Updater helps you automatically update card details — such as expiration date changes, account number changes or account closures — so you do not have to contact each customer individually.

BlueSnap offers multiple Account Updater services, and which service you use depends on which solutions you use to store card details and manage subscriptions:

• Card storage — BlueSnap vaulted shoppers or store cards on your system.
• Subscriptions — BlueSnap Subscriptions or merchant-managed subscriptions

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BlueSnap offers your customers’ preferred global payment types and currencies and works with 30+ global acquiring banks. By routing transactions through local acquirers, BlueSnap increases approval rates and reduces transaction fees that can occur from cross-border processing. This is especially valuable for businesses with a global customer base.

Yes. BlueSnap’s Intelligent Payment Routing and failover capabilities help reduce false declines by ensuring each transaction has multiple opportunities for approval. These systems use machine learning and transaction history to improve approval success.

By optimizing transaction routing and using local acquiring banks, BlueSnap helps reduce cross-border fees, interchange rates and gateway charges. BlueSnap also consolidates reporting and third-party integrations, reducing operational overhead.

Yes. BlueSnap supports preferred global payment types and currencies, including digital wallets, ACH, SEPA, major cards and local payment methods. This ensures that customers can pay how they prefer, improving your conversions and customer satisfaction.

BlueSnap provides a robust reporting and analytics dashboard that offers insights into approval rates, declines, fees, retries and more. Businesses can use this data to identify trends, optimize strategies, and improve their bottom line.

Absolutely. BlueSnap offers pre-built integrations with platforms like BigCommerce, Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage Intacct, and more. This enables easy adoption of BlueSnap’s payment optimization without disrupting your existing tech stack.

Yes – learn more here.

Payment tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive payment data online (or digitally), such as the primary account numbers (PAN) of a credit card, with a placeholder token. Using this token in place of the actual data during a transaction greatly reduces the risk of that data being compromised. Even if it’s stolen, the data is useless to the thief outside of the specific context it was intended for.

Encryption is the classic means of protecting sensitive data by transforming information with an encryption key, which can then only be read with the correct decryption key. Unlike tokenization, when encrypted data is transferred, the actual sensitive information is still transmitted, leaving it vulnerable to being intercepted and stolen. And all encrypted files, no matter how sophisticated, are eventually decryptable.

Tokens, however, are functionally useless if copied or stolen. They act more like unique keys to get access to data, which issuing banks will not provide outside the intended specific context or approved vendor.

3-D Secure is an XML-based protocol that is designed to add an extra layer of security through authentication for online credit and debit card transactions. It has been adopted by most card brands, including Visa (VerifiedbyVisa), MasterCard (SecureCode), American Express (SafeKey), Discover ProtectBuy and JCB (J/Secure).