You optimize everything to get a customer to checkout. But what happens when the payment fails? We refused to accept that losing 1 in 4 sales to failed transactions was "part of the game." This is why we built Paymend: to turn your biggest revenue leak into a new source of sustainable growth.
Where it all started
For most e-commerce founders, failed payments are treated as background noise. A transaction fails, the customer leaves, and the revenue disappears. You shrug, tweak a retry rule, and move on to buying more traffic.
That mindset is expensive.
After Jack and I exited our previous payments business, we went on to operate and invest in several e-commerce brands ourselves. The pattern was always the same. We could scale traffic. We could generate demand. But approval rates never quite reached where they should have been.
The approval rate issues in e-commerce
At best, we were seeing approval rates of around 70–75%. That meant roughly one in four customers who wanted to buy simply couldn’t. In higher-risk categories, it was far worse. We regularly saw merchants running at 30–40% approval rates, meaning more than half of all paid traffic never converted.
When a payment failed, that money was assumed to be gone for good and all the merchants' efforts and resources spent to acquire new customers went for nothing.
Retries, cascades, routing tweaks but everyone does those. After that, there was nothing left to try. The revenue fell into a black hole.
The real damage wasn’t just the lost sale. Failed payments distort everything. CPAs climb. ROAS drops. Scaling becomes harder. Marketing teams are blamed for problems they can’t control. Cash that should have been available to reinvest simply never arrives.
What made it more frustrating was that banks weren’t always right. We kept seeing declines that made no sense. Transactions flagged as suspicious when there was no fraud. Cards with funds available being declined for vague or incorrect reasons. Customers who genuinely wanted to pay being turned away.
Over time, you just accept it as “part of the game”. Until you see how much money is actually leaking.
The partnership
Jack and I had already spent years deep in payments by that point. We originally met through a mutual business partner and went on to build Rebills together, a checkout solution focused on improving conversions and approval rates. Within two years, we took it from zero to an exit at just under eight figures.
Jack has always been the visionary. I’m operational by nature. Payments sat right at the centre of what we did. Our clients cared about approval rates, and so did we. Over that period, we dealt with high-risk processing, multiple MIDs, complex routing, global settlements, and declines at serious scale. By the time we exited, we’d seen hundreds of millions of dollars in failed transactions flow through systems we were responsible for.
The conclusion was unavoidable. The system wasn’t just inefficient. It was broken.
Naturally, we looked for existing solutions before deciding to build anything ourselves. We worked with PayFacs and processors that promised dramatically higher approval rates. For a few months, things would look better. Then rules would change, approvals would slip, or the solution would quietly stop delivering altogether.
It was always the same story. Big promises, no accountability, and no real incentive alignment. Nobody was actually focused on recovering the revenue that had already failed.
That was the moment we said it out loud. There has to be a better way.
How Paymend was born
The earliest version of Paymend was messy. We started by pulling transaction data into a Google Sheet and manually testing recovery logic. That sheet quickly hit API limits. Early retry rules became outdated almost as soon as we wrote them. There was a lot of manual work and constant experimentation.
But something important happened very early on. Revenue started coming back.
Not in theory. Not in projections. Actual recovered revenue.
That’s when everything changed. Declines weren’t random. There were patterns. Timing mattered. Routing mattered. Issuer behaviour mattered. If you understood how banks interacted with retries, velocity, and routing, you could recover transactions everyone else had already written off.
What nearly stopped us was complexity. Banks don’t love payment recovery. Merchant of Record structures are hard to get right. Risk and compliance teams are rightly cautious. Building trust took time.
But once it worked, it really worked.
At its core, Paymend is a Merchant of Record solution focused entirely on recovering declined payments.
- You plug us in as a secondary layer.
- We handle the recovery.
- We assume the risk.
- We make payouts on recovered revenue.
- You only pay a fee on what we actually recover.
If we don’t recover anything, you don’t pay us.
That alignment matters.
Where we are today
Today, Paymend works with merchants ranging from around $100,000 a month in revenue to tens of millions per month. Across the platform, we’re currently recovering around 8% of declined transactions, and that number continues to climb as our logic improves. We’re pushing hard toward double digits.
In real terms, that means millions of dollars a month in recovered revenue, moving into the tens of millions. We haven’t had a single month this year where recovered volume didn’t grow.
For merchants, the impact is straightforward. More revenue from the same traffic. Higher net payouts. More budget available to reinvest in growth. The most common thing we hear is simple and slightly painful: they didn’t realise how much money they were losing.
Before Paymend, every decline was lost revenue. Now we just route it and the money appears. 14% of our failed transactions recovered - easy integration, zero headaches. Eli Mosko, VP Payments - Fitness Tech Holdings LLC
We care about this problem because we lived it ourselves. We struggled with it for years. We know how many businesses are quietly affected by it. We’re proud of the team we’ve built, proud of the expertise across payments, finance, and risk that Paymend.
What’s next
Our ambition is to build the number one Merchant of Record and payment recovery platform in the world, working with international and well-known brands and merchants. . There’s a lot we’re building behind the scenes:new infrastructure, intelligence layers, routing capabilities, and we’ll share more when the time is right.
We want to simplify and change how online payments flow. Failed transactions won’t be treated as an unavoidable loss. They’ll be treated as what they really are: recoverable revenue.
