Glossary
Cascading
Cascading is the automatic retry of a declined payment on the next terminal of a route group, within the same checkout session and without asking the payer again. It recovers declines caused by the provider, such as its risk rules, limits or outages, and must not retry declines caused by the card itself, such as insufficient funds or a stolen card; the schemes limit reattempts and charge for excessive ones.
Soft and hard declines
A soft decline is the provider’s own answer: a risk rule, a velocity limit, an unsupported BIN, a timeout. The next provider may approve the same payment. A hard decline is the issuer’s answer about the card: no funds, invalid card, stolen card, a failed authentication. Retrying it is useless and harms the business’s standing with the schemes. The cascade starts with that classification.
What cascading costs
Each attempt takes time the payer waits through and a fee at the terminal that finally approves; the chargeback ratio of recovered payments must be watched, because a payment the first acquirer refused may be the one that comes back. The honest measure is the recovered share per route group, counted on the business’s own traffic.
On the platform
In Tranzify a route group is an ordered list of terminals with priorities and weights; the cascade stops on hard declines, caps the attempts per payment and journals every attempt with its reason, so the reports show what it recovers and what it costs.
Updated: 2026-11-08