You rely on your payment gateway for business success. Without it, you simply can’t accept payments from customers. Unfortunately, all gateways at one time or another experience outages and performance issues. Across Recurly’s supported gateways, we’ve documented an average of 40 performance issues per year. With downtimes up to several minutes, this can add up to significant lost revenue. This is no insignificant concern for an online business because transaction success directly contributes to maximizing your revenue. 

When a payment gateway goes down, businesses lose the revenue from the transactions that can’t be processed. And for subscription businesses, this problem is dangerously multiplied--if the prospect never returns, you not only miss out on the revenue from a subscriber’s initial sign-up, you also miss the ongoing recurring revenue from that subscriber’s entire lifetime value. Imagine if this happens during Black Friday or while streaming the Super Bowl. These are once-in-a-year (maybe once-in-a-lifetime!) subscriber acquisition opportunities.

To keep powering your subscription commerce, even when external challenges threaten, we’re excited to announce a new gateway routing feature: Gateway Failover. We built this capability to provide business continuity when your gateway stops functioning properly. It automatically detects when your specified payment gateway suffers an outage or other problem, and then routes transactions to a backup or “failover” gateway. This way, you’ll keep processing subscription signups and one-time transactions without missing a beat.

Gateways automatically transmit information for every transaction, indicating either transaction success or the reason for a decline. Decline responses include many valid decline reasons, such as Insufficient Funds, Do Not Honor, Fraud, and so on. A Communication Error response may also indicate that the gateway is experiencing problems. When a gateway sends a higher-than-average number of these response types, Recurly can revert to your specified backup gateway to allow the transactions to be processed. Recurly will also track when your primary gateway recovers and auto-revert back to it. 

As an online business, you have no shortage of things you worry about. Let us take “Is our gateway working?” off that list. We’ll always be there to monitor gateway status and take action on your behalf whenever problems arise. It's the latest example of our commitment to build the best technology to optimize your payments.

To use the Gateway Failover feature, you will of course need to configure an additional gateway for desired currencies and card types. We encourage you to consider using this powerful new feature to safeguard your revenue--and give you peace of mind. Learn more about the benefits of having multiple gateways in our recent blogs here and here. When evaluating additional gateways, you’ll want to conduct due diligence to choose the gateways that are best for your unique business. 

Recurly supports many different gateways. To learn more check out our quick video, or talk to a Recurly expert at (844) 732-8759. You can also sign up for a demo here.