What is authorization rate? 

When a customer pays on your site, your payment processor (e.g. Stripe) sends that transaction request to the customer's bank for approval. The bank then accepts or declines it. Authorization rate measures the percentage of requests that get approved. Unless you’re using payment processors that help improve your authorization rate, that decision sits with your customer's bank, not with you. 

As a publisher, your revenue depends on online transactions; even if it’s a legitimate sale, your customer’s bank may flag it as potential fraud risk, and deny the payment. That means losing money that you'd already earned. 

According to Stripe, online businesses can have a 10% lower authorization rate than in-person transactions, because without a physical card to verify, banks default to caution. 

Why should I care about authorization rate?

If your authorization rate is low, you lose revenue: not by your own fault, and not because a subscriber wanted to leave. It's a solvable problem – and tools like Stripe can address it at scale. ITVX, a UK streaming subscription service, saw a 10.6% increase in authorization rate using Stripe's Smart Retries and card account updater, resulting in hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit that would have otherwise been lost. 

Based on our data across publisher clients, involuntary churn – failed payments, outdated card details, insufficient funds – can cost publishers up to 10% of their subscriber base every month. Improving your authorization rate by just 0.5% can translate to millions of dollars in additional revenue each year.  

A high authorization rate means more payments get processed successfully – and while 100% isn't realistic, every percentage point closer means more revenue. 

That’s important at the first transaction, and for publishers, every time your subscribers renew. At renewal, your readers' payments happen automatically – your subscribers aren't there to notice an expired card or update their details when a renewal comes around. If the payment fails, they lose access quietly. That means losing revenue you'd already earned, without a single intended cancellation. 

Why do transactions get declined? 

The most common reasons are: insufficient funds, wrong, outdated, or expired card details, fraudulent behavior, and issuer outages (when your customer's bank is temporarily unavailable).  

How to prevent transaction declines?

Each declined transaction comes with a code that explains why the bank rejected it. Banks often use the same code to cover multiple reasons at the same time. As a business, that makes managing declines difficult. 

When you know why a transaction got declined, you can act on it: retry a transaction in case of insufficient funds, ask your customers to update their card information if it’s wrong, outdated, or expired, or use fraud prevention tools in case of suspicious activity.  

Not all declines are equal. Soft declines are temporary – the card is valid, but something situational blocked the transaction, like a momentary lack of funds or a bank system hiccup. Hard declines are permanent: the card is invalid, cancelled, or flagged for fraud. The distinction matters because soft declines can be retried. And in subscription businesses, soft declines make up the majority of failed payments – which means most of what you're losing is recoverable – but only if you have the right tools to act on it at scale. 

How Stripe and Piano recover payments for publishers 

As a Piano customer, you have a detailed picture of your users: what they do, how they pay, with information updated in real time. You can tailor each user's experience at scale – converting readers into subscribers faster, and keeping the ones you have longer. 

Our partnership with Stripe helps you grow revenue by getting the most out of each transaction. Think of it as an invisible layer of financial intelligence underneath your subscription business that recovers more payments and leaves fewer transactions up for chance. With Stripe, 94.4% of your transactions go through – compared to an industry average of around 85% for unoptimized online businesses. 

How is Stripe different from other providers? 

Stripe prevents payment declines more effectively than most payment providers using sophisticated machine learning and real-time signals. Most solutions have a simple cadence-based strategy to retry transactions every few days. Stripe’s technology finds the optimal time of day and day of week to retry failed attempts, learning from your customers’ issuing banks, card updates, and other customer-specific information, making it more targeted and more effective than traditional solutions. Stripe processes so many transactions that 92% of the time a given card has already been used on the Stripe network. 

Most of what Stripe does, your subscribers never see. If a payment fails, Stripe retries it at the right moment, and the subscription continues – no manual intervention, no lost revenue.