YTGATE Diagnoses Payment Environments for 200 E-commerce Operators: Average Payment Approval Rate is 85.4%, Median is 88.0%

YTGATE Inc. (Headquarters: Chuo-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Yutaro Takahashi; hereinafter "YTGATE") has conducted a visualization of the payment environments for 200 companies operating their own e-commerce sites nationwide. The results show an industry-wide average payment approval rate of 85.4% and a median of 88.0%. Furthermore, by categorizing the results into eight ranks (A through H) and analyzing their distribution, it was revealed that 73 companies (36.5%) fall into D rank or lower, with an approval rate of less than 85%.

What is Payment Approval Rate?

This refers to the percentage of online shopping credit card payment attempts that are successfully completed. For example, if 95 out of 100 payment requests are successful, the payment approval rate is 95%.

The remaining 5 failures are typically due to reasons such as "exceeding credit limits," "expired cards," or "automatic rejection by card issuers due to suspected fraudulent use." In some cases, legitimate customers with purchase intent drop off due to payment errors, meaning a lower approval rate directly leads to lost sales opportunities.

Payment approval rates vary significantly depending on the industry, average transaction value, and payment method composition, and can fluctuate monthly even for the same operator. Despite this, few e-commerce operators monitor this metric regularly. It is a prime example of a metric where businesses are "losing money without realizing it."

Diagnosis Overview

• Target: 200 e-commerce operators nationwide with their own online stores.
• Evaluation Method: YTGATE independently analyzed and aggregated payment data from each company, evaluating the approval rate across eight ranks:

A: 100–95%, B: 95–90%, C: 90–85%, D: 85–80%, E: 80–75%, F: 75–70%, G: 70–65%, H: Below 65%

Diagnosis Results and Distribution

The results for the 200 companies are as follows:

• Overall Average: 85.4%
• Overall Median: 88.0%

There is a 2.6-point gap between the average (85.4%) and the median (88.0%). This indicates that a certain number of operators with extremely low approval rates are pulling down the overall average. In fact, the 9 companies in the H rank (65% or less) had an average approval rate of 42.3%, which is more than 40 points below the overall average. (*)

Even among operators with similar annual sales, there is a gap of up to 62.7 points in approval rates. This data reveals that differences in payment design and operations create significant disparities.

* Companies in the H rank (approval rate of 65% or less) may be outliers affected not only by structural issues in payment approval but also by system defects, operational problems, or external factors such as credit master attacks.

<Disparities in Approval Rates by Industry>