HOW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM CAN IMPROVE GLOBAL PAYMENT ACCEPTANCE RATE

Introduction

Every successful transaction directly impacts on social media platform revenue, growth, and user trust. For global social media platforms seamless payment process is important, especially when the whole payment ecosystem become increasingly complex. 

Many digital companies still struggle with authorization rates, fragmented data visibility, and inconsistent payment performance across regions. These challenges lead to revenue loss, frustrated users and very limited global growth potential.

As the expert in payment acceptance optimization, Allyiz helps high-growth online businesses transform their payment operations into the true revenue engine. 

In this case study, you’ll explore how social media platforms can overcome low payment acceptance rate and achieve measurable improvements in transaction processing and conversion rates.

Social Media Platforms Payment Acceptance Rate Challenges 

About the Client

The client is a global social media platform that specializes in video content promotion. For the last ten years, the company has grown from a niche app for creative expression to well-known social media platform with hundreds of millions of active users across the world.

The company cooperated with advertisers from many regions and with different payment infrastructures and regulatory frameworks. The rapid global expansion has led to new payment challenges that demanded fast and effective solution.

The Challenges 

As the global growth and more new users come, the client noticed a significant drop in payment acceptance rates, particularly in emerging markets.

These were the main challenges:

• Absence of a consistent perspective on acceptance performance across global regions.

• High payment decline rates cause revenue loss and user annoyance.

• Difficulty pinpointing whether issues stemmed from fraud tools, issuer behaviour, or technical routing inefficiencies.

• Limited internal expertise to perform deep acquiring and payment flow analysis.

After some attempts to solve the problems on their own, the client turned to Allyiz — digital payments experts to conduct an audit and get strategic insights, actionable recommendations, and a clear roadmap to improve acceptance rates.

Allyiz Payment Acceptance Optimization Approach

Allyiz used five organized workstreams to carry out a thorough acceptance rate improvement project:

1. Global Benchmarking

The first step in the project was to establish a clear understanding of how the client was performing across different regions. Allyiz experts began by collecting and analysing internal payment performance data from five key markets: North America, Latin America, Europe, CEMEA, and Asia-Pacific. This data included authorization rates, decline codes, payment method usage, and transaction success rates.

Once Allyiz had a full picture of the client’s internal metrics, experts compared these results against trusted industry benchmarks and third-party data sources. Using insights from leading payment industry reports, benchmarking tools, and peer performance data, experts were able to determine what “good” looked like for each region.

This benchmarking exercise revealed where the client was performing well and where there were gaps compared to competitors. In several high-growth markets, authorization rates lagged behind regional averages, suggesting inefficiencies in acquirer setup, routing logic, or issuer handling.

By mapping these differences, Allyiz experts were able to pinpoint underperforming regions and identify possible root causes of low acceptance rates. These findings provided the foundation for the rest of the project, ensuring that all recommendations were data-driven and targeted to deliver the highest impact.

2. Root Cause Analysis

Allyiz payment experts decided to conduct a comprehensive deep-dive analysis of the client’s payment flows and transaction data. This began with a thorough review of issuer decline codes, allowing team to detect recurring patterns such as high soft decline rates or region-specific issuer behaviors that were negatively affecting authorization success.

Next, Allyiz performed an audit of the client’s fraud prevention tools, 3DS2 authentication flows, and transaction routing logic. This helped to evaluate whether certain risk rules, authentication steps, or routing decisions were inadvertently creating friction for legitimate users.

Allyiz also assessed the efficiency of retry mechanisms, the effectiveness of acquirer setups, and BIN-level performance across different card types and regions. By analyzing these technical details, team could determine which acquirers and payment routes were contributing to unnecessary declines.

This approach uncovered several hidden barriers to successful payments including overly strict fraud rules, under-optimized retry logic, and inefficient acquirer routing. By bringing these issues to light, team was able to build a targeted action plan to increase approval rates, and unlock significant revenue potential.

3. Acquirer and Issuer Strategy

After payment flow analysis Allyiz developed a data‑driven strategy to optimize relationships with both acquirers and issuers, focusing on improving approval rates and reducing unnecessary declines.

Key initiatives included:

• Designing optimal acquirer switching strategies to dynamically route transactions through the highest‑performing acquirers based on card type, region, and historical success rates.

• Identifying high‑impact issuers for proactive engagement, ensuring that relationship‑building efforts targeted the institutions most critical to improving authorization outcomes.

• Providing ready‑to‑use communication templates and metadata‑sharing guidelines, making it easier for the client to collaborate with issuers, share relevant transaction data, and resolve common decline scenarios.

4. Cross-Team Workshops

Allyiz organized a series of highly interactive workshops bringing together stakeholders from product, risk, engineering, and finance. These sessions were designed to ensure that every team had a clear understanding of how their decisions impacted payment performance.

During the workshops, Allyiz:

• Mapped the end‑to‑end decision‑making process, visualizing how payment‑related decisions flowed across teams and where bottlenecks or misalignments occurred.

• Identified critical friction points that were negatively affecting authorization rates or user experience, using real‑world data and case studies to contextualize the issues.

• Shared benchmarking insights and best practices, providing teams with a data‑driven view of where the client stood relative to industry leaders.

• Educated stakeholders on key KPIs for payment success, ensuring everyone understood the metrics that mattered most such as approval rate, fraud‑related declines, and transaction routing efficiency.

These workshops created a shared sense of ownership, equipped each team with actionable insights, and laid the foundation for coordinated improvements across the entire payment ecosystem.

Key Outcomes and Results

After all social media platform payment challenges that faced the client, Allyiz managed to achieve remarkable improvements in payment performance:

• Built a real-time dashboard for payment performance tracking.

• Gained clarity on retry logic effectiveness and failure reasons.

• Reduced payment friction, leading to higher payment conversion rate improvement.

• Strengthened relationships with acquirers and issuers, paving the way for long-term success.

Most importantly, the client’s payments team shifted from reactive problem-solving to a proactive, data-driven strategy. They now operate with full visibility, actionable insights, and a clear roadmap for continuous optimization.

Why Payment Acceptance Optimization is a Growth Lever

For global e-commerce and digital platforms, every declined payment is lost revenue. Yet, most companies lack the expertise or resources to diagnose and fix acceptance issues. That is why they don’t know how to improve online transaction success.

Allyiz team combines technical expertise, strategic consulting, and hands-on experience to:

• Increase authorization rates and conversion rates.

• Enhance acquirer and issuer collaboration.

• Optimize fraud tools and 3DS2 handling.

• Deliver data-backed insights for sustainable payment growth.

What is payment acceptance optimization?

Payment acceptance optimization is the process of improving transaction success rates by analyzing and enhancing factors like acquirer routing, issuer collaboration, retry logic, and fraud tools.

How does improving authorization rates impact revenue?

Even a small 1% increase in authorization rates can result in millions of dollars in additional revenue, especially for high-volume global platforms.

What are common reasons for payment declines?

Declines often occur due to issuer risk rules, insufficient funds, outdated payment methods, technical routing errors, or fraud prevention tools.

How does 3DS2 optimization best practices improve payment success?

By reducing unnecessary authentication friction, 3DS2 optimization helps boost conversion rates while maintaining security.

How can businesses improve retry logic efficiency?

Businesses can analyze issuer-specific decline codes and design smart retry strategies to increase the chances of successful approvals.