Payment Consulting for Online Merchants

I help online merchants recover revenue lost to declined and failed payments. If your approval rate is stuck, good customers are being blocked by fraud rules, or subscription renewals keep failing, you are losing sales you already paid to acquire. Most of that revenue can be won back without adding traffic, by fixing how payments are routed, retried, tokenized and screened.

Request a free Payment Performance Audit →

Who this is for

• Ecommerce and subscription businesses processing $1M or more a year in card payments
• Payments, product and finance leaders who see declines but lack the time or in-house expertise to diagnose them
• Teams choosing a new processor, adding a second acquirer or planning a payment orchestration layer
• Marketplaces and SaaS platforms deciding between PayFac, ISO and embedded payments models

Signs you are losing revenue to payments

• You do not track approval rate by card brand, issuer, BIN and country
• A large share of your declines come back as a generic “do not honor”
• Fraud rules or a fraud vendor reject orders that nobody reviews
• Subscription renewals fail and you retry on a fixed schedule
• You are not using network tokens or an account updater for stored cards
• Processing fees keep creeping up and nobody has reviewed your pricing in years

What I help with

Authorization rate optimization

Find where approvals are lost by issuer, BIN, country and payment method, then fix message quality, 3DS usage, MCC and descriptor setup, and acquirer choice. Read the authorization rate guide.

Decline analysis and recovery

Separate soft declines you can recover from hard declines you should stop retrying, and build rules around reason codes. See the decline codes reference.

False declines and fraud tuning

Rebalance fraud rules and vendor thresholds so you stop rejecting good customers while keeping chargebacks under scheme limits. Fraud vs non-fraud declines explained.

Retry logic and dunning

Design smart retries and dunning flows that follow Visa and Mastercard rules and recover failed renewals. Retry logic and dunning guide.

Network tokenization and account updater

Move stored cards to network tokens to lift approvals, cut fraud and keep credentials current. How network tokenization works.

Processor selection, routing and orchestration

Choose the right processors, add failover and cost-based routing, and decide whether an orchestration layer is worth it. How to choose a payment processor and what payment orchestration does.

Processing cost reduction

Review interchange optimization, pricing models and processor contracts to lower your effective rate. Where your processing fees go.

Chargebacks and disputes

Reduce disputes at the source and improve win rates on the ones you fight. Chargebacks explained.

The free Payment Performance Audit

The audit is a short, no-cost review of your payment setup that shows where you are losing approved revenue and what to fix first.

What you get:

• A review of your payment stack: processors, gateway, fraud tools, tokenization and retry logic
• A read on your decline mix, soft vs hard and by reason code, from a report you share
• The three highest-impact fixes I would make, with expected effort and impact
• A 30-minute call to walk through the findings

How it works:

1. Tell me about your setup. Send a short message with your processor, approximate monthly volume and the problem you are seeing.
2. Share a decline report. An anonymized export of declined transactions with reason codes from the last 30 to 90 days. No card data needed.
3. Get your findings. I send a written summary, usually within a week, and we review it together on a call.

Ways to work together

• Free Payment Performance Audit – a quick diagnosis and the top three fixes.
• Payment diagnostic – a deeper two to four week analysis of your transaction data with a prioritized roadmap and business case.
• Advisory or fractional payments product manager – hands-on help shipping the roadmap with your engineering team, processors and fraud vendors.

Experience

I have spent 20+ years in technology and 15+ years in payments, in product and engineering roles at CyberSource (Visa), Wells Fargo, Chase, NCR and SiriusXM. I have led authorization rate, fraud prevention, tokenization and payment orchestration work at enterprise scale, launched a connected-vehicle e-wallet, and designed point-of-sale payment architecture for a 14,000-location fuel retailer. I write about what I have learned on this blog. See my full resume.

Frequently asked questions

What does a payments consultant do?

A payments consultant reviews how a merchant accepts, authorizes, screens and settles card payments, then finds where revenue or margin is being lost. Typical work covers authorization rate, decline handling, fraud rules, retry logic, tokenization, processor selection, routing and processing fees.

How much can I improve my authorization rate?

It depends on your starting point, your mix of card brands, issuers and countries, and how your stack is set up today. Merchants who have never tuned retries, tokenization or fraud rules usually have the most room to improve. The audit gives you a realistic estimate for your business before you commit to anything.

Is the Payment Performance Audit really free?

Yes. The audit is a short, no-obligation review with a written summary of the three highest-impact fixes and a 30-minute call. If you want help implementing them, we can talk about a paid diagnostic or advisory work afterwards.

What data do you need for the audit?

A description of your payment setup and, ideally, an export of declined transactions with reason codes from the last 30 to 90 days. Aggregated or anonymized data is enough. I never need full card numbers, and I am happy to sign an NDA.

Do you work with my payment processor?

Yes. I am processor-agnostic and have worked with gateways, acquirers and orchestration platforms across the industry, including Adyen, Stripe, Braintree, Worldpay, Checkout.com and CyberSource.