As Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, e-commerce is already preparing for one of the busiest and most profitable shopping weekends of the entire year. Millions of shoppers flood websites looking for deals, and many retailers prepare months in advance for the spike in demand. But there’s one area that often gets overlooked: payments.
During festive season, payment systems face heavy pressure, increasing the likelihood of failed transactions – meaning many orders never make it past checkout. This leads to significant revenue loss during the biggest sales weekend of the year. Customer behaviour makes this even more challenging: shoppers expect speed and simplicity, and any friction at checkout can quickly lead to abandoned cart.
To help merchants avoid this, here’s a closer look at the reasons why payments fail during festive season and what businesses can do to prevent avoidable losses.
The most common payment failure causes
High decline rates during peak volume
Even on normal days, authorisation rates vary depending on many factors. But on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these systems face a volume spike that exposes every inefficiency in the payment flow. Processors, gateways and issuing banks may struggle to handle the traffic, resulting in slower responses or increased time-outs.
In addition, issuer-side fraud controls become more sensitive during high-activity periods. Banks often tighten risk thresholds when they see unusual spending patterns, which Black Friday naturally produces. Customers buy more frequently, in higher amounts and from new merchants. What looks like legitimate seasonality to a merchant may look like fraud to an algorithm. The result is a jump in declines at exactly the moment merchants need conversions the most.
Slow authentication & SCA friction
In the UK and EU, Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) plays an important role in preventing fraud, but during intense sales periods it can also slow customers down.
Many consumers still rely on one-time passwords sent via SMS or mobile banking apps. When issuers are under heavy load, these authentication steps can lag, time out, or fail to trigger altogether.
A large share of European transactions now requires an authentication challenge, and any delay in receiving a code or completing the approval becomes a point of friction. During Black Friday, the tolerance for friction is extremely low. Shoppers move quickly between sites and often abandon the purchase if an authentication step feels confusing or takes too long. That loss is amplified by the high traffic volume, making SCA one of the most significant contributors to failed checkouts during peak season.
Outdated checkout user journey
Checkout is where many peak-season conversion losses happen. And not because of fraud or infrastructure, but simply because the checkout flow hasn’t kept up with customer expectations. These often see higher abandonment rates during Black Friday and Cyber Monday than during the rest of the year.
Common friction points:
❌ too many steps or form fields
❌ poor mobile experience
❌ no autofill or saved-card
❌ lack of fast payment methods
4 tips how businesses can prepare for Black Friday & Cyber Five
- Test the payment infrastructure early. Before traffic spikes, simulate Black Friday-level volumes across the entire payment stack. Running these tests early helps identify weaknesses long before real customers are affected.
- Offer a broad range of payment methods. Choice plays a major role in conversion, particularly during intense shopping periods. Making sure that customers can pay with Apple Pay/Google Pay and traditional debit/credit cards reduces the likelihood of cart abandonment.
- Improve the checkout experience. Simple checkout fixes go a long way:
✅ show clear error messages instead of generic “Payment failed”
✅ suggest alternative payment methods immediately after a decline
✅ auto-save the cart
✅ reduce steps in the checkout flow
✅ ensure strong mobile optimisation
✅ use autofill, address lookup
- Get a good acquirer. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, strong acquirer support becomes crucial. A good payment partner can help route transactions more efficiently, enable more payment methods, retry soft declines automatically, help keep approvals high even when traffic peaks and more!
If you want to strengthen your payment performance ahead of the festive season, PAYSTRAX can help. To learn how we can support your business – contact us today.
For more insights on staying protected during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, read our related article 👉 https://paystrax.com/blog/top-payment-frauds-on-black-friday-and-cyber-monday-how-to-protect-your-business/
