Understand payment performance

Payment performance in Reveal Transactions is how you measure whether payments succeed at checkout and where they fail. Reveal reports authorization and decline rates at both the transaction and order level, then helps you segment those rates, diagnose error reasons, and measure recovery after retries.

This section is the foundation for reading every chart under Performance. If you have not connected a processor yet, start with Get started with Transactions. For a prioritized summary of opportunities, use Insights.

To open Performance, select Transactions from the toggle at the top center of the dashboard, then select Performance in the left navigation. Use the tabs Auth Rate, Decline Rate, Retry & Recovery, and Error Distribution for the detailed views described in this section.

What authorization means in Reveal

Authorization is the process by which a cardholder's issuing bank approves or declines a payment attempt. When a customer tries to pay, the issuer checks that the account can support the amount and that the attempt looks legitimate.

An authorized transaction means the issuer approved the amount for that attempt.

Reveal treats a transaction as authorized even if the merchant later expired or voided it. An order is considered authorized only when it was successfully captured (funds were transferred). That difference is why transaction-level and order-level rates can diverge for the same period.

Related terms are defined in the standard terms glossary.

Transactions versus orders

Before you interpret authorization or decline rates, separate these two units of measurement:

• A transaction is a single attempt to charge a payment method.
• An order is a customer purchase that can include one or more transactions—for example when the first attempt fails and the customer or a recovery system tries again.

Some Chargebee-connected sites label order-level charts with invoice wording (for example Invoice Success). In Reveal docs and the glossary, that unit is still an order: one purchase that may span multiple payment attempts.

Example: one order, two transactions

A customer tries to pay $100.

1. Their first card is declined (Transaction 1).
2. They try a second card, which is approved and captured (Transaction 2).

That scenario is:

| Unit | What happened | Count toward rates | | --- | --- | --- | | Transactions | One decline, one approval | Two transaction attempts | | Order | One purchase completed | One successful order |

Transaction-level authorization looks weaker than order-level authorization in this case, because the declined attempt still counts at the transaction level while the order ultimately succeeded. Use both views together: transaction rates show attempt efficiency; order rates show how often purchases complete.

Where to analyze payment performance next

Use these pages in order when you are diagnosing checkout health:

• Authorization rates — Measure success by count and by volume at transaction and order level.
• Decline rates — Measure failure the same way, including how Reveal defines a declined order.
• Drill down into auth and decline rates — Segment and filter by Customer Country, Transaction Currency, Gateway Account, 3DS Flow, Funding Type, and more.
• Retry analysis and order recovery — See how often orders succeed on Attempt 1 versus later retries.
• Error analysis — Break down failure reasons and quantify revenue impact.