CardX Lets Mastercard Users ‘Click-to-Pay’

Surcharge compliance firm CardX has added Mastercard’s Click to Pay to its payment platform.

The feature is now available for all card-not-present merchants using CardX’s Lightbox platform, the company said in a Wednesday (April 5) news release.

“Given the present economic uncertainty, managing costs and optimizing approval rates is critical,” the release said. “Click to Pay makes the payment process as frictionless as possible for consumers, leading to higher approval rates and the potential for increased merchant sales.”

Lightbox lets consumers input their card information directly into Click to Pay where it is tokenized, making checkout simpler while protecting user data, according to the release.

Earlier this year, international movie theater chain Cinépolis reported that it had seen a 6% increase in its transaction success rate thanks to the Mastercard Click to Pay program, which in this case was implemented via payments orchestration platform Spreedly.

“For our customers, speed of the transaction is critical when purchasing tickets for new releases where seats are reserved for a small amount of time during checkout,” Cinépolis Global Head of Digital Transformation and Customer Experience Marco Garcia de la Cruz said at the time.

PYMNTS research has shown that payments orchestration systems are vital for preventing payment method declines by implementing new payment methods and opening different payment gateways in a seamless and customer-friendly way.

If one payment gateway goes offline, the system will automatically route the payment through a new gateway and carry out the transaction without any intervention from either the merchant or the customer, according to the “Payments Orchestration Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration. This drives decline rates down to acceptable levels.

“One case study found that a business reduced its decline rate to between 5% and 8% of all transactions while reducing false declines by up to 35%,” PYMNTS noted last year.

More recently, PYMNTS spoke with Jesus Luzardo, vice president and head of global partnerships and international sales at subscription management platform Vindicia, about the importance for direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses to find a reliable method of combating payment declines.

Luzardo said that 8% to 10% of terminally failed payments were the result of “issues in the payment infrastructure, from the merchant billing platform to payment processor to card network to issuing bank. All that infrastructure has inefficiency in communication between platforms.”

As PYMNTS noted, an 8% to 10% drop in revenue can impact any business and could be the last straw for subscription-based retailers already surviving on thin margins.

“Luckily, this top-cited headache is avoidable, and solutions can be found in the best practices of top-performing competitors,” wrote PYMNTS.