Many businesses come to Stripe because they want a modern payment provider that can unify transaction data across systems, unlock the innovation potential of their business, and fit into their existing technology stack.

However, businesses tell us that they are concerned about maintaining their payments performance during a migration. Payments performance, especially with authorization rates, typically experiences the most volatility during the first six weeks following any major change.

That’s where Stripe can help. We’ve enabled half of the Fortune 100 to achieve best-in-class payments performance. Along the way, we’ve identified three key factors that help enterprises successfully adopt Stripe as their new payment provider: the integration design itself, merchant ID (MID) warming, and performance measurement methodology.

In this guide, we’ll share how we manage these complexities throughout the payments optimization journey to ensure you achieve your authorization rate goals.

The performance optimization journey when adopting Stripe

Migrating to a new payment processor requires a strategic approach to maintain and improve your payments performance. The process typically spans several months, with performance stabilizing within the first six weeks and creating opportunities for long-term improvements.

When adopting Stripe, enterprise payments optimization follows a four-stage progression from initial planning through continuous improvement.

Stage 1: Integration design and planning (pre-week 0)

Payments optimization begins during integration design and strategic planning—well before you start implementing Stripe. You’ll need a comprehensive understanding of your customer payment cycles and behaviors, such as preferred payment methods. You’ll also need to understand your broader payments setup: do you have any existing payments orchestration and infrastructure? Which third-party tool integrations do you currently manage? Do you anticipate introducing new business models that might require a different payments architecture? All of these factors can have unexpected impacts on your payments performance.

Stripe has a flexible structure that accommodates different charge patterns and funds flows, allowing you to create the integration that works best for your business. It’s important to design your integration in a way that both optimizes for your business needs and de-risks the rest of the payments optimization process. Working with an experienced partner that understands financial infrastructure—such as our professional services team—can help you navigate this phase with a proven plan of action that accelerates growth, reduces costs, and mitigates risks.

With Stripe professional services, you can create an in-depth monitoring and testing plan, and design telemetry to track your key performance indicators—such as authorization rate, decline types, and transaction latency. For example, PepsiCo worked with our professional services team to save a year of engineering time and design an integration that now powers 4 divisions and 23 brands.

Stage 2: Initial implementation and merchant ID warming (weeks 0–3)

During this stage, you’ll execute on the integration you designed. This stage is often characterized by temporary performance variations and requires fine-tuning and patience, as issuers and card networks learn to trust your new MID—a numeric ID that identifies your business and how issuers identify your transactions. When you adopt a new payment processor, you are assigned a new MID. As issuing banks start receiving transactions from your new MID, their algorithms might automatically increase scrutiny on those transactions to assess whether the “new” merchant is a legitimate business. This can lead to a temporary dip in payments performance.

Over time, as issuers see enough trustworthy transactions and “warm up” to the new MID, they typically reduce their scrutiny and authorize more transactions. Different issuers have varying sensitivities to new merchants, processing patterns, and volume changes.

Prototypical shapes of MID warming curves

Rather than taking a passive approach and allowing issuers to warm your new MID organically, successful businesses take a proactive approach. A proactive MID warming strategy often includes:

• Processing your highest-quality transactions—those with the highest authorization rate and lowest fraud rate
  
• Processing single transactions first before introducing recurring transactions
  
• Processing domestic transactions before international transactions
  
• Using Stripe’s optimization features, such as network tokens and card account updater, while gradually scaling up to your full volume over the course of weeks
  

Increasing transaction volume too quickly without allowing issuers’ fraud detection systems to adapt, processing with inconsistent transaction quality, or keeping transaction volume too low can all result in decreased payments performance. Stripe experts can guide you through this process and provide recommendations on appropriate transaction volumes for your business type and industry.

Stage 3: Optimization and tuning (weeks 4–8)

Establish a like-for-like basis for comparing your payments performance metrics during the optimization and tuning phase, so you can make informed decisions from accurate data. Authorization rate calculations can vary between processors based on how they categorize and report declined transactions. There are generally three ways to group transactions to generate an authorization rate:

• First attempt authorization rate: The authorization rate of the first processing attempts for transactions.
  
• Raw authorization rate: The authorization rate with each processing attempt treated as a unique event, including customer-initiated and automated repeat attempts to complete a payment.
  
• Deduplicated authorization rate: The authorization rate of all transactions that make it to the network and issuer. This measures the final outcome of payment attempts that belong to the same payment.
  

When adopting a new payment processor, ensure you’re set up to compare authorization rates before embarking on any payments performance testing.

With Stripe’s support plans, a dedicated technical account manager (TAM) can analyze your payment trend and customer behavior data, and share best practices to minimize risks from suboptimal retry logic and other factors. TAMs collaborate closely with our payments performance specialists, who conduct comprehensive performance analysis to detect patterns in authorization rates. Together, they can help you implement optimizations across core payment pillars: authorizations (including retry strategy and MID warming), authentication (global 3D Secure optimization), fraud (including transaction risk and disputes), network costs, and local payment methods.

Stage 4: Continuous improvement and scaling (weeks 8+)

Payments optimization is an ongoing process. Market changes, regulatory updates, seasonal fluctuations, and shifting customer payment preferences all require your continuous attention and strategic adjustment. Premium and Enterprise support plans provide proactive management of these changes. Your TAM will work with internal experts and your entire support team to analyze your payments data, continuously improve your integration, and ensure you meet your performance goals.

During this stage, you can also gradually scale the volume of transactions that you’re processing on Stripe. Tools such as Authorization Boost—which combines Stripe’s AI-powered acceptance optimizations into one product—will have an increasingly noticeable impact, as they deliver an average of 2.2% additional revenue and reduce card processing costs by an average of 2.8%.

Best practices for migrating payments volume to Stripe

Payments migrations require specific strategies to minimize performance disruption and maintain optimal results. Our best practices include:

Backing up key payments data

Begin optimization planning during integration design. Back up important data from your previous processor, including authorization rate data covering at least one year (ideally two years) to account for seasonal variations and vault characteristics—particularly the percentage of expired or outdated payment methods.

Gradually ramping up transaction volume

We recommend gradually increasing transaction volume rather than immediately migrating all transactions. Ramping from 1% of total transaction volume up to 10% of volume through the first 4 weeks is a good starting pace. This gradual increase allows you to evaluate if the integration requires any tweaks, if issuers perceive your new MID to be high-risk, or if there are any other performance challenges that would require a slower ramping pace. Continuing to ramp about 5% per week will allow you to reach full volume over the course of about 6 months. This gradual increase is a key ingredient in the proactive MID warming approach we discussed in the second stage.

Running card account updates with your existing provider

If possible, we recommend running card account updates with your existing provider before migrating to Stripe. Otherwise, work with your migration team at Stripe to run batches of card account updates before you start processing transactions. You can also work with your team at Stripe to make sure your payment methods are tokenized, where available, depending on your vault setup and how you’re managing network tokens. This can positively impact your authorization rate and decrease the impact of an MID warming period.

Providing ongoing payments education to stakeholders

For key decision-makers and business leaders, provide education about payments performance patterns and maintain proactive communication about expected timelines. By sharing the roadmap of the payments performance tuning process, you can strategically deploy optimization tools rather than using them as immediate reactive measures.

How Stripe can help

Companies such as Ford, Amazon, Lyft, and Atlassian partner with Stripe to solve payment challenges specific to their industries and to build better customer experiences.

As you adopt Stripe, we provide a suite of optimization tools and tailored services to achieve your payment goals.

Optimization tools and capabilities

Stripe offers several tools that help businesses grow revenue through improved payments performance and reduce costs by simplifying operational complexity:

• Authorization Boost can increase authorization rates by 2.2% on average and reduce card processing costs by up to 2.8% for IC+ users through a robust toolkit of payments performance optimization tools—including Adaptive Acceptance, network tokens, and card account updater.
  
• Enhanced Issuer Network enables enterprises to see an authorization rate improvement of 1%–2% on eligible volume.
  
• The Stripe Dashboard offers comprehensive analytics and reporting for data-driven optimization.
  
• Stripe’s platform supports complex enterprise requirements, including multiprocessor environments through Stripe Orchestration, sophisticated routing logic, comprehensive decline code analysis, and automated optimization tool deployment.
  

Implementation support

Stripe offers comprehensive enterprise implementation support from a team of payments experts who provide guidance for payments performance optimization, including payments strategy consulting, migration planning and execution support, custom integration design, and ongoing performance monitoring and continuous improvement.

Drawing on our experience designing and implementing thousands of integrations, we work with your team to understand your specific business requirements, existing payments infrastructure, and optimization goals to develop tailored performance optimization strategies.

Want to see what’s possible?

Learn more about Stripe Payments and how it converts more customers for enterprises.

Get in touch with our team to design a package specifically for your business.