Gateway Report

The Gateway Report provides a real-time view of your payment gateway's operational health. By tracking every transaction sent to your gateway — regardless of type or billing cycle — this report helps you detect performance issues, monitor decline trends, and ensure your payment infrastructure is running smoothly.

What This Report Includes

Transactions Included:

Only transactions that were actually sent to the gateway for processing
Transactions across all billing cycles and attempt numbers
Test orders are excluded
Date range is based on Transaction Date (when the transaction was processed by the gateway)

Why This Matters: Your payment gateway is the backbone of your revenue collection. Slow response times frustrate customers and increase checkout abandonment. Rising decline rates directly erode revenue. This report gives you the visibility to catch and address gateway issues before they impact your bottom line.

Report Metrics

Total Attempts

The total number of transactions sent to your payment gateway during the selected period. This includes every type of transaction — authorizations, captures, refunds, voids, and any other operations processed through the gateway. Use this as your baseline volume metric to understand overall gateway utilization and to contextualize decline rates.

Response Time

The average time (in seconds) that your payment gateway took to respond to transaction requests. This measures the round-trip duration from when a transaction was submitted to when the gateway returned a result. Longer response times can degrade the customer checkout experience and may indicate gateway congestion, network issues, or processing bottlenecks. Monitoring this metric helps you hold your gateway provider accountable to performance expectations.

Total Declines

The total number of transactions that were declined by the payment gateway. Declines can occur for many reasons — insufficient funds, expired cards, fraud flags, issuer restrictions, or gateway-level errors. Tracking total declines alongside total attempts gives you the raw volume of failed transactions to investigate.

Decline Rate

The percentage of total transaction attempts that resulted in a decline. This is calculated as Total Declines divided by Total Attempts. The decline rate is the single most important metric for ongoing gateway health monitoring. A sudden increase may indicate a gateway outage, a change in fraud settings, or an issue with a specific card network. Gradual increases over time may point to aging payment methods in your subscriber base or changes in issuer policies.

Available Dimensions

Use these dimensions to slice and filter your gateway data for deeper analysis.

Dimension	Description
Transaction Date	The date the transaction was processed
Transaction Hour	Hour of day when the transaction was processed (0–23)
Transaction Day Of Week	Day of the week the transaction was processed
Transaction Week	ISO week number of the transaction
Transaction Month	Month and year of the transaction
Transaction Year	Year the transaction was processed
Transaction ID	The unique transaction identifier
Transaction Attempt	The attempt number for this charge
Transaction Cycle	The billing cycle of the transaction
Gateway	The payment gateway used
Gateway Transaction ID	The gateway's transaction identifier
Gateway AVS Code	Address Verification System response code
Gateway CVV Code	Card Verification Value response code
Gateway Response Code	The gateway's response code
Processor Response	The response message from the processor
Merchant	The merchant account used for processing
Merchant Group	The merchant group the merchant belongs to
API Validation Code	The validation code returned for the API request

Key Business Insights

Baseline Your Decline Rate: Establish a rolling average decline rate over several weeks. Any deviation of more than a few percentage points from your baseline should trigger immediate investigation. What counts as "normal" varies by business model, but most subscription businesses target a decline rate below 10-15%.
Response Time Monitoring: Track average response time daily. If response times consistently exceed 2-3 seconds, customers may abandon checkout or experience timeout errors. Sudden spikes in response time often precede broader gateway issues.
Volume Trend Analysis: Monitor Total Attempts over time to understand your transaction volume patterns. Unexpected drops in volume may indicate an upstream issue (such as a checkout or integration problem) rather than a gateway issue. Unexpected spikes may stress your gateway and increase decline rates.
Decline Rate by Day of Week: Look for patterns in decline rates across different days. Some businesses see higher decline rates on weekends or at month-end when customer accounts are more likely to have insufficient funds.
Correlate with Other Reports: Cross-reference gateway decline trends with your Cancellations Report (passive cancels) and Abandons Report (declined orders). Rising gateway declines often cascade into higher passive churn and lower checkout conversion.

Optimization Strategies

Optimize Response Times

If response times are consistently elevated, contact your gateway provider to investigate performance on their end
Monitor for specific transaction types that may have longer processing times and evaluate whether they can be optimized

Gateway Provider Management

Use this report to hold conversations with your gateway provider backed by data
Compare performance across gateways if you use multiple providers to identify the best-performing option for different transaction types
Request decline reason code breakdowns from your provider to complement the data in this report

Pro Tips

Check this report first whenever you notice unusual trends in other reports. Many issues that appear as conversion drops, increased cancellations, or revenue dips are actually rooted in gateway performance changes.
Pair decline rate analysis with gateway-specific decline reason data from your gateway provider's dashboard. The Gateway Report tells you how many transactions are declining; your provider's data tells you why.
Use response time as an early warning system. Gateway performance degradation often appears in response times before it shows up in decline rates. A gradual increase in average response time is a signal to investigate proactively.
Review this report after any gateway configuration change — including fraud rule updates, processor migrations, or new payment method additions — to verify that the change had the expected impact and didn't introduce regressions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this report include all transaction types? Yes. The Gateway Report includes every transaction processed through your gateway — authorizations, captures, refunds, voids, and all other operations. There are no restrictions by billing cycle or transaction type, giving you a complete picture of gateway activity.

What does a high response time mean? A high average response time means your payment gateway is taking longer than expected to process transactions. This can lead to customer-facing delays during checkout, increased timeout errors, and potentially higher abandonment. Typical healthy response times are under 2 seconds.

How is the Decline Rate different from the decline rates in other reports? The Gateway Report's Decline Rate covers all transactions across your entire business — every cycle, every type. Other reports like the Abandons Report focus on specific subsets (such as first-cycle orders only). The Gateway Report gives you the broadest possible view of payment processing health.