How a high-traffic health & wellness DTC brand stopped losing revenue at checkout

This brand operates in the fast-growing health gadget and pain relief vertical, running a high-traffic direct-to-consumer checkout experience. With strong brand equity and significant marketing investment driving consumers to their site, maximizing revenue from every transaction, as well as maintaining CAC under control, are a core commercial priority.

The brand works with a tier-one payment processing stack, including enterprise-grade acquirers and processors, delivering strong baseline approval rates. But at scale, even a small percentage of failed transactions represents substantial lost revenue. 

Working with Paymend

The challenge

Despite strong PSP infrastructure and existing recovery mechanisms, including abandoned cart flows and agent-led outreach, a significant share of declined transactions remained unrecoverable through internal means.

The challenge was a structural ceiling. Without the technology, acquirer relationships, or infrastructure to route and retry failed payments at scale, recoverable revenue was consistently slipping through. Recovering declined payments is a specialized problem and it isn't always where PSPs choose to commit their resources. Their priority is processing the first attempt well, not chasing the transactions that fall through after it.

As the business continued to grow, it became clear that building and managing this capability in-house wasn't viable long-term. The team needed a trusted partner who could own the recovery layer entirely, so they could stay focused on what they do best: selling and maintaining CAC under control. 

The solution

Paymend was deployed as the dedicated recovery layer, positioned after all internal retry logic and PSP attempts had been exhausted. The key differentiator wasn't just intelligent routing technology. Paymend acts as the payment agent on every recovered transaction, taking on the risk and liability entirely, leaving the merchant's existing processing portfolio completely untouched.

This unlocks access to a new ecosystem of processors and acquirers that the merchant couldn't otherwise reach, without any operational burden or repercussions to their existing payment infrastructure. Declined transactions that were genuinely wanted by consumers at live checkout could now be recovered end to end.

The partnership continues to deepen as the merchant scales. With Paymend now a proven backbone of their payment flow, both teams are focused on expanding the recovery scope, capturing more of the declined transaction pool across checkout as volume grows.

The longer-term goal: fewer avoidable declines, higher authorization rates, and a payment infrastructure that compounds in performance over time.

We had strong PSPs and solid approval rates, but there was always a percentage of revenue we couldn't get back. When you're spending heavily to acquire customers, losing them at payment is the worst possible place to leak. Paymend recovers that revenue without us having to touch anything, we just see the revenue land. Brand's CEO