Every business processes payments, and every transaction contains clues about customer behavior and revenue performance. Businesses can use payment analytics—from authorization rates to payment method mix—to learn customer patterns and then use those patterns to drive growth. The importance of payment analytics has become clear, with the global data and analytics software market worth an estimated $141.91 billion USD in 2023 and projected to reach $345.32 billion by 2030.

When you analyze your payment metrics, you can better understand why customers are completing or abandoning checkouts, where revenue leaks are happening, and which improvements are likely to increase conversions and cash flow. Many companies use insights from real-time payment data to improve success rates, forecast revenue more accurately, and design better customer experiences.

Below, we’ll discuss why payment analytics matters for business growth and how it can turn transactions into actionable insights.

What’s in this article?

• What is payment analytics?
  
• Why is payment analytics important for business growth?
  
• What payment metrics should businesses track?
  
• What types of payment analytics are there?
  
• How does payment analytics improve performance and decision-making?
  
• How can companies implement payment analytics effectively?
  
• What are common payment analytics use cases?
  
• What challenges do businesses face with payment analytics?
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

What is payment analytics?

Payment analytics is the process of collecting and studying the data that is created every time a customer pays you. This includes how much they spend, what they buy, how they pay, and whether payments succeed or fail.

When you combine data from across your checkout, point-of-sale (POS), and billing systems, you create a single view of how money moves through your business. This view shows you which payment methods customers are choosing, where transactions are failing, and how different sales channels are performing.

Payment analytics can help you understand customer behavior at the moment of purchase and use that information to improve operations and grow revenue.

Why is payment analytics important for business growth?

Every transaction contains signals about your customers: how they buy, what they buy, and where they get stuck. Payment analytics can turn those signals into feedback for business growth. Analyzing payments lets you spot issues such as a sharp increase in card failures or chargebacks, or an emerging customer trend such as digital wallets overtaking credit cards in certain markets.

Payment analytics can help your entire organization connect decisions to outcomes. The finance department can forecast cash flow with more precision, product teams can design better checkout experiences, and marketing can tie campaigns directly to successful payments.

What payment metrics should businesses track?

Tracking the right metrics reveals how money moves, where there’s friction, and what needs attention.

Here are some suggested metrics to track:

• Transaction volume and value: Tracking the payments volume and value by channel or market can identify high-level growth trends and show when sales momentum starts to shift.

• Payment method usage: This is how often customers choose to pay with different payment methods. Monitor how usage shifts between cards, digital wallets, and bank payments to spot new preferences early and adjust your checkout experience or pricing strategy.

• Authorization and decline rates: Authorization rate is the percentage of payments that are successfully approved, and decline rate is the percentage that are not approved. Even a small drop in authorization rate can mean lost revenue at scale. Studying the reasons for declines (e.g., issuer, region, authentication) helps pinpoint the problem.

• Chargeback and fraud rates: These are the rates at which charges are reversed or flagged as fraudulent. Chargebacks can signal customer confusion, product issues, or fraud patterns. Tracking these metrics helps you adjust policies or fraud tools before problems escalate.

• Payment-linked retention and churn rates: These are the percentage of subscription customers who successfully renew (retention rate) vs. discontinue (churn rate) their subscription because of the linked payment method. Monitoring how many cancellations result from payment issues helps you intervene by sending automatic reminders to update cards or offering alternative payment options.

What types of payment analytics are there?

Sometimes businesses will use a mix of payment analytics approaches to turn raw transaction data into insights.

These are the four main types of payment analytics:

• Descriptive analytics: Looks backward. It summarizes what’s happened (e.g., sales totals, average order values, payment success rates) to reveal patterns in past performance.

• Diagnostic analytics: Asks why. When declines spike or conversions drop, this analysis finds the cause, such as checkout user experience, issuer problems, or failed authentications.

• Predictive analytics: Looks ahead. It uses past data to forecast trends, such as when demand will peak or which customers are likely to churn.

• Prescriptive analytics: Charts a course of action. It recommends what to do next, such as add a new payment method, adjust risk settings, or prepare for seasonal volume.

How does payment analytics improve performance and decision-making?

Payment analytics improves decision-making across the business, from product design to pricing, by showing what’s truly happening when customers pay.

Here is how payment analytics can help businesses:

• Spot hidden revenue leaks: Even a 1% improvement in authorization can recover millions in annual revenue for large businesses. For example, a company might boost its acceptance rate by simply identifying and fixing a technical issue linked to a specific card network.

• Strengthen forecasting and cash flow: Finance teams use live payment data to model cash flow with greater accuracy. Real-time data helps them see revenue patterns, anticipate seasonal swings, and catch anomalies—such as delayed payouts or sudden chargeback spikes—early.

• Refine customer and product decisions: By tying payment data to customer behavior, teams can see which payment methods lead to repeat purchases or higher order values.

How can companies implement payment analytics effectively?

Executed well, payment analytics becomes a shared, data-driven language for how your business gets paid.

These are the steps to implement payment analytics.

Choose tools that fit your data maturity

Businesses with small teams or low data maturity might need tools that are easy to deploy and that require minimal data engineering, while businesses with larger, more established teams might be able to give more hands-on attention. Choose what works for your current situation.

Integrate every payment channel

Disparate systems hide patterns. Use application programming interfaces (APIs) or data pipelines to bring together checkout, subscription, and in-store transactions.

Create standards for data quality

Inconsistent field naming (e.g., “Visa” in one system, “VISA Credit” in another) can distort authorization metrics. Establish naming conventions, automated validation, and a single data dictionary to keep every metric consistent across platforms.

Build analytical fluency

Encourage your teams to hold regular cross-functional reviews of payment data so that they can act on insights. Train teams to question the data in reports and link findings to action.

What are common payment analytics use cases?

Payment analytics is relevant for all industries, and the best results come from solving specific, day-to-day challenges.

Here are specific use cases for payment analytics:

• Ecommerce: Payment analytics can pinpoint where in the checkout stage customers are dropping off and which payment methods are converting best.

• Retail: Analytics can compare in-store and online payments. Consolidating those streams often uncovers geographic or timing trends, such as a surge in evening card payments in urban areas or higher contactless usage in suburban stores. These trends can inform investment in staffing and payment devices.

• Subscription businesses: Monitoring renewal rates, retry success, and involuntary churn often helps identify when card expirations or authentication rules start eroding retention.

• B2B payments: You can identify which clients consistently pay late or early, and then tighten cash-flow forecasts and adjust credit terms. Detecting even a small delay trend can reclaim working capital weeks sooner.

What challenges do businesses face with payment analytics?

Payment analytics can transform how you understand your business’s revenue, but you might encounter challenges in implementation.

Be aware of these potential issues:

• Low data quality or accuracy: Inconsistent or incomplete data can result in misleading conclusions. Small errors, such as mismatched timestamps or duplicated transactions, can skew success rates.

• Fragmented systems: Companies often rely on multiple payment systems. Without unified data, it’s difficult to get a complete picture of customer behavior. Integration through APIs or data warehouses solves this, but it requires technical investment and disciplined maintenance.

• Complex compliance and security requirements: Payment data is sensitive. Keeping it encrypted, tokenized, and compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) adds complexity. Businesses should balance accessibility for analysis with strict data protection standards.

• Lack of data-driven decision-making: Even the best analytics tools can fail if teams don’t act on the insights they uncover. Build habits around the use of payments data to make decisions.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to over 125 payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.

• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across more than 135 currencies.

• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.

• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.

• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.