Blocked payments at checkout quietly kill conversion because nearly half of those failed transactions never complete, and most shoppers never make it back after fighting with their banking apps. Treat this as a hidden revenue leak you can measure, message around, and design alternatives for.
Blocked payments sit in a blind spot between your checkout and the customer’s bank, which means a chunk of “abandoned” checkouts were actually willing buyers who got lost in someone else’s fraud system.
New research reveals that nearly half of blocked payments at checkout never complete. Here’s what that means for your conversion rate.
While conversion rate optimisation usually focuses on the checkout page, there’s a category of lost sale that doesn’t show up cleanly on your analytics dashboard.
New research from payment infrastructure company DECTA suggests this is more common than most merchants realise.
When a customer adds to cart, gets through your checkout, and tries to pay, you might reasonably assume the job is done. But that payment still has to pass through the customer’s own banking or payment app. If that app’s fraud or risk screening flags the transaction, the payment is blocked, declined, or paused.
No alert to you. No clear message to the customer. Just friction, right at the moment of purchase.
DECTA’s 2026 study, which surveyed 1,506 banking app users and analysed 159,600 app store reviews across Europe’s 10 most-used banking and payment apps, found that 77.2% of consumers have had a payment blocked by their own app. That’s not an edge case. It’s the overwhelming majority of your customer base.
When a payment gets blocked, most customers try to resolve it through their banking app. The study tracked what happens next.
Of the consumers whose purchases got blocked by their banking apps, most tried to fix the problem themselves. 56.6% of affected users tried to reach a human agent first, but 76.3% ended up dealing with a chatbot at some point during resolution.
These chatbots resolved the problems that customers reported to them only 11.4% of the time. Half (50%) had to escalate to a human agent. Nearly 15% never got a resolution at all.
Meanwhile, your customer is still at your checkout, waiting. Patience doesn’t last long.
The downstream numbers are where this gets concrete for merchants.
48% of blocked transactions never completed. Nearly half of affected users said their transactions did not succeed. Many had to find alternative ways to complete their purchases, or they didn’t pay at all.
10% went straight to a competitor. Another 10% of these consumers had to use a different payment application or bank to complete their purchases. For merchants who offer only one checkout experience, that’s a lost sale.
27.6% were embarrassed at the point of failure, often in front of someone at a checkout. That kind of experience leaves a mark. The friction isn’t just a lost order in the moment. It’s a negative memory attached to your brand.
And the resolution window isn’t quick: 56.7% of affected users said it took hours or days to sort out. A customer chasing their bank through the day isn’t coming back to your checkout that session.
This matters for ecommerce because the resolution layer is broken, and it’s getting worse.
Consumer trust in AI chatbots for money problems is close to zero. In the same survey, just 5.4% of consumers said they trust a chatbot most to fix banking app problems. 65.2% want a human agent. A 12-to-1 preference.
The customers who get blocked at your checkout and then hit a chatbot are, in nine out of ten cases, hitting a dead end. Negative app store reviews specifically blaming chatbots for unresolved problems rose 55.49% year on year across Europe’s 10 biggest banking and payment apps. The frustration is growing, and it’s happening at the exact interface between your checkout and your customer’s bank.
One more finding worth flagging: most customers don’t think of themselves as being systematically over-blocked. The study found a 64-point gap between the share of consumers who believe their app is too cautious (13.4%) and the share who have actually had a payment blocked (77.2%).
Customers treat each block as a one-off, not a pattern. They won’t necessarily switch banks because of it. But they will abandon your checkout while they try to resolve it, and nearly half of them won’t come back to complete the purchase.
While merchants do not have control over the difficulties that customers experience when trying to complete transactions through the banks where they maintain accounts, merchants can limit the damage caused by these failures.
Offer customers more than one payment option. In the event that one of their payment methods gets blocked during checkout, they can still complete their purchase using an alternate method.
Ensure that your payment failures have clear messaging. Do not compound the issue that your customers experience by having poor messaging on your website following payment failures. Make it clear that the problem might be on the bank’s side and offer them solutions to fix it.
Rethink the flow for abandoned carts with payment failures. Many customers who encounter a payment failure might want to continue with their purchase once they are made aware of solutions. Sending recovery emails that specifically mention the payment issues that customers encountered when leaving your cart will improve the chances of recovering those lost sales.
Track payment failure reasons where your processor surfaces them. Soft declines (the bank blocked it) are different from hard declines (insufficient funds, card issue). If your payment provider segments these, you can start to quantify how much revenue you’re losing to this specific failure mode, rather than lumping it all into a general abandonment bucket.
The data doesn’t suggest the problem is going away. Banking apps are deploying more AI in their fraud and risk screening. Consumer trust in that AI to fix the resulting problems is exceptionally low. The gap between those two facts is where ecommerce revenue disappears.
This article draws on findings from DECTA’s 2026 study, “AI in Banking Apps: A Study on Blocked Payments and Chatbot Failure,” which combines a 1,506-respondent UK consumer survey with an analysis of 159,600 app store reviews across Europe’s 10 most-used banking and payment apps. Full findings: https://www.decta.com/company/media/ai-in-banking-apps-a-study-on-blocked-payments-and-chatbot-failure
The simplest way to estimate revenue lost to blocked payments is to separate soft declines from other payment failures in your processor reports and then calculate the conversion gap between those sessions and your normal checkout conversion rate.
Start by pulling a period of payment data and tagging any decline codes your provider classifies as bank-decision or fraud-related rather than card errors or insufficient funds, then multiply the count of these soft declines by your average order value to get a baseline revenue-at-risk number you can track over time.
An effective payment failure message should tell customers that their payment did not go through, acknowledge the issue may be with their bank or payment app, and offer clear next steps like trying a different card or payment method.
Avoid generic “something went wrong” copy and instead include reassurance about double-charging, a brief suggestion to check their banking app for alerts, and a prominent way to retry payment or contact your support team if they remain stuck, which makes the experience feel managed rather than mysterious.
The payment methods that usually move the needle fastest are popular digital wallets and any major local alternatives your target markets rely on, because they give customers instant fallback options when a primary card fails.
For many Shopify and DTC brands this means combining a core processor with wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, adding buy now pay later where it fits your margin profile, and offering region-specific methods such as local bank transfers or wallets in markets where card penetration is lower.
For carts abandoned after a payment failure, your flow should explicitly reference the payment issue, reassure customers they were not charged, and invite them back with alternatives rather than sending a generic reminder.
Set up a segment or trigger that catches failed payment events, then send a short series of messages that includes a plain-language explanation, a link that jumps straight back into checkout, and a prompt to try a different card, wallet, or bank once they have checked their app for fraud alerts or blocks.
If you suspect a specific bank is over-blocking your customers, you should bring your processor a consolidated view of decline codes, bank identifiers, and timeframes that show a clear pattern of soft declines from that institution.
Processors respond best when you can contrast that bank’s soft decline rate and downstream completion rate against your overall averages, because that gives them a concrete case to escalate with the bank or to suggest risk setting adjustments that reduce false positives without opening you up to real fraud.
