Consumer Behavior in Payment Failures and Retry Attempts in Online Ticket Purchasing

Abstract

A declined payment interrupts the purchase of an event ticket at the moment of highest commitment, yet the behavioral response of the buyer to this interruption has received limited attention. This study examines how consumers respond to payment failures and how often interrupted orders are resolved successfully. The analysis draws on 2 anonymized transaction datasets from the Russian ticketing industry: 25,811 acquiring operations from a ticket marketplace and 199,635 orders from 3 ticketing companies within 1 holding, covering January 2024 to June 2026. The study applies transaction-level behavioral analysis to operational payment records and triangulates consumer responses after a failure through the combination of operation-level and order-level evidence. Declines affected 23.0% of payment attempts. A retry followed 55.7% of initially declined orders, the median pause before a repeated attempt equaled 3 minutes, and 43.7% of such orders ended in a completed payment. Recovery depended on the cause of the failure: orders declined for reasons a buyer can correct, such as an incorrect CVV code or insufficient funds, and recovered at close to twice the rate of orders interrupted by processing errors. Retries made after a pause of 5 to 15 minutes succeeded in 74.8% of cases, while immediate repetition succeeded in 25.0% of cases. Among recovered orders, 80.1% kept the original payment instrument. At the order level, 27.6% of purchases expired before any payment method was selected. The findings describe retrying as a mass consumer response, quantify the recoverable share of failed revenue, and provide platforms with guidance on designing retry prompts and payment method switching at checkout. The results extend checkout abandonment research into the interior of the payment stage, add the interpretability of the failure cause to models of service failure recovery, and document consumer persistence under the time pressure of an expiring seat reservation.