92% of enterprise merchants hit by payments outages as BR-DGE research exposes resilience gaps
Nine in 10 (92%) enterprise e‑commerce merchants have experienced payment outages or disruption in the past two years, according to new research from independent payment orchestration provider BR‑DGE. Half say those failures cost between £1.1m and £10m in lost revenue, while more than half (54%) reveal payment limitations have held back growth plans.
Checkout failures hit revenue first. Acceptance rates fall, abandonment increases and customer goodwill takes a nosedive. The damage goes beyond lost sales; it undermines trust and piles pressure on other areas of the business. But checkout failures aren’t only caused by outages. Failing to provide the right customer experience is just as damaging. That’s why resilience has moved from the back office onto the boardroom agenda.
To help merchants, BR‑DGE has launched the Payments Resilience Playbook, a hands-on guide for enterprise e-commerce teams to strengthen their payment infrastructure. Built around real merchant setups, it shows how teams maintain performance under pressure, reroute volume during outages and optimise approval rates without disrupting existing systems.
The Playbook outlines five building blocks of modern resilience: redundancy, flexibility, interoperability, optimisation and future-readiness, supported by insights from BR-DGE’s latest research and real-world examples from leading merchants.
Thomas Gillan, CEO at BR-DGE, said: “When payments fail, customers don’t wait, they drop their baskets, switch providers and often don’t return. Even short outages can mean millions in lost revenue and lasting damage to customer trust – and that’s before you add other payments issues into the mix. Yet too many merchants still see resilience as a safety net rather than a growth strategy.
“Our research shows that building a flexible, interoperable payment infrastructure is essential not only to avoiding outages; to keep customers, protect revenue and open new markets.”
Key findings from BR-DGE study of 50 enterprise e-commerce leaders:
- Outages: 92% experienced payments outages or disruption in the past two years.
- Losses: 50% reported losses of £1.1m–£10m; 4% reported over £10m.
- Failover: 32% have automated backup routes; 68% rely on manual fixes.
- Concentration risk: 71% route most volume through a single primary provider, increasing incident exposure.
- Tokenisation: Only 12% have a fully interoperable, independent token vault, despite 78% using tokenisation.
- Expansion: 54% say payments limitations have delayed or prevented entry into new markets.
- Integration: 44% cite technical integration as the biggest obstacle to improving resilience.
BR‑DGE’s latest study shows resilience is a growth lever as well as a safeguard. With the Payments Resilience Playbook, BR‑DGE sets out practical steps to help teams strengthen performance today and prepare for tomorrow.
The Payments Resilience Playbook is available to download now.
Research insights are provided in more detail here.