When a mid-sized international ecommerce retailer, there were some clear signs of early success. Transaction volumes increased, new markets opened, and the business continued to grow.
But as volume and regional complexity increased, payment performance began to slip. Approval rates declined in key markets, and customer-facing issues became more frequent.
Here’s how Maayan stepped in to diagnose the issue, stabilize performance, and turn a critical payment challenge into a foundation for growth.
The challenge: declining approvals and rising customer complaints
The Merchant began to see a steady rise in declined transactions across key Asian markets. Customers reported refused cards, failed checkouts, and inconsistent payment outcomes.
Internally, the Merchant’s CTO and payments operations team scrambled to trace the root cause. Although fraud rules, regional regulations, and authentication flows all appeared to be contributing factors, the team struggled to isolate the cause.
As approval rates declined and customer complaints increased, the issue escalated into a high-stakes challenge that demanded urgent intervention.
Maayan’s response: hands-on, market-specific optimization
Maayan’s Key Account team took the lead in coordinating analysis and remediation. They followed a structured, three-stage approach to identify root causes, improve performance, and restore stability over time.
1. Rapid triage and diagnostics
Maayan’s Key Account Manager quickly arranged a “war room”: a joint working session with the Merchant’s payments, fraud, and technical teams. Transaction logs were analyzed by country, card type, and error code.
Within 48 hours, several clear patterns had emerged, including:
- Issuer-specific 3DS mismatches in certain markets
- False positives triggered by overly aggressive fraud rules
- Missing data fields required by local regulations
Together, these findings confirmed that the issue wasn’t a single failure point. It was a combination of regional, technical, and risk-related factors that required a coordinated, market-specific response.
2. Tailored optimization, not one-size-fits-all fixes
Rather than applying blanket changes to the Merchant’s entire payments setup, Maayan’s Key Account Manager proposed a phased, market-by-market approach to optimization. This involved:
- Temporarily adjusting and tailoring fraud thresholds in each of the high-decline regions under close monitoring
- Enabling alternative local payment methods where card acceptance was weaker
- Updating the integration to include required regional data fields
Jekaterina Petrova, Maayan’s Customer Onboarding and Support Team Lead, says: “When payment performance starts to slip, speed matters, but context matters even more. We don’t just fix issue, we work side by side with our merchants and take shared ownership of the challenge. In this case, close collaboration and market-specific adjustments helped turn a critical moment into lasting improvements in payment performance”.
3. Shared visibility and continued monitoring
Once these changes were live, Maayan provided the Merchant with access to a shared performance dashboard. This gave both teams real-time visibility into the signals that directly influence payment performance, including:
- Approval rates
- Decline reasons
- Chargeback trends
- Risk indicators
Weekly check-ins over six weeks allowed the teams to review results, fine-tune configurations, and ensure stability before expanding changes to additional markets.
The outcome: measurable improvements in performance
As the changes took effect, payment performance improved steadily across the region.
Within two months, the Merchant’s approval rates in Asia had increased by 5%, while customer payment complaints had dropped by over 25%.
Alongside these improvements, checkout reliability improved, support volume decreased, and the merchant regained confidence in its payment setup across the region.
Looking ahead: from recovery to long-term optimization
With performance stabilized, the focus shifted from recovery to long-term optimization.
Maayan’s Key Account Manager worked with the Merchant to put initiatives in place to support future growth. These included:
- Dynamic routing strategies based on transaction risk
- Quarterly performance reviews across regions
- FX optimization to reduce conversion costs when settling in lower-volume currencies
Together, these initiatives have created a foundation for consistent payment performance as the business has continued to expand into new markets.
Hands-on support, the Maayan way
The Merchant’s experience reflects the depth of involvement and practical expertise merchants can expect from Maayan as their businesses scale.
We stay closely involved as transaction volumes grow, new markets open, and payment requirements evolve. Our Key Account Managers work alongside the merchant teams to anticipate challenges, adapt setups market by market as complexity increases.
The result is more consistent approval rates, fewer customer-facing issues, and payment performance that keeps pace with growth.
Want to work with a payments partner that combines hands-on support with deep payments expertise? Learn more about Maayan’s platform for global eCommerce.
The merchant’s name has been anonymized due to NDA.
