Top 5 unrecovered failures from yesterday’s batch, ranked by cart value. Powers the daily-revenue-leakage 90-second morning briefing, the named-customer recovery list for high-touch outreach.
At a glance
The top 5 highest-value unrecovered failed orders from yesterday’s batch, ranked by total_inc_tax descending. Powers the daily-revenue-leakage 90-second morning briefing, the named-customer recovery list for human, high-touch outreach.
| What it counts | Yesterday’s failed orders (paymentStatus = declined OR status = Incomplete) filtered to any_recovered = No (the customer has not yet succeeded within the recovery window), sorted by total_inc_tax descending, top 5 only. Each row carries customer email, name, country, dominant payment method, and attempted total. |
| VAT / tax treatment | Tax-inclusive. Sort uses total_inc_tax. |
| Shipping | Included in the displayed total. |
| Discounts | Already deducted, the value shown is what the customer was trying to pay. |
| Refunds | Not in scope, this card looks at orders that never collected cash. |
Incomplete orders | Included. Most Incomplete orders capture a billing email at the address-entry step before payment, so contact details are usable. The few that don’t (very rare, typically theme-misconfigured stores) are excluded automatically. |
| Cancelled orders | Excluded. Cancelled = merchant-initiated void on a previously-captured order; not in the failure recovery population. |
any_recovered filter | Hard filter to No. If a customer already self-recovered overnight (retried successfully within the 30-day window), they are removed from this list. This keeps the list to genuinely unrecovered targets. |
| Currency | Sorted by raw total_inc_tax, no FX conversion. Multi-currency stores see mixed-currency rankings, the largest USD failure may show above a larger GBP failure depending on FX. Use BC Revenue by Currency to understand the mix. |
| Channels / sources | Not filtered. In practice marketplace channels rarely produce failures (pre-authorised), so the list is mostly Stencil web (channel_id = 1) and POS. |
| ”Yesterday” definition | The most recent fully-completed UTC day. Refreshed each sync, so the list is ready when the merchant’s morning shift starts. Note that “yesterday” in store-local time may differ by ±1 day. |
| Time window | 1D (yesterday only) |
| Alert trigger | None. The presence of any high-value entry IS the action signal. |
| Roles | owner, marketing, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your BigCommerce data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
The morning of 13 Apr 26 on a US homewares brand on BigCommerce Enterprise. Yesterday (12 Apr 26) saw 16 failed orders; 11 of them are still unrecovered. The top 5 by attempted value:| Rank | Customer | Country | Failure type | Attempted value | Payment method | First action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | j.smith (j.smith@…) | US | Declined (insufficient funds) | $1,420 | Credit Card (Stripe) | Email + phone |
| 2 | robinson (rob@…) | UK | Incomplete (3DS timeout) | $980 | Credit Card | |
| 3 | kim_lee (k.lee@…) | US | Declined (fraud rule) | $612 | PayPal Express | Phone |
| 4 | mark_w (m.wong@…) | CA | Incomplete (network drop) | $448 | Apple Pay | |
| 5 | lin@startup (lin@…) | US | Declined (CVV mismatch) | $389 | Credit Card | |
| Yesterday’s top-5 prize | $3,849 |
- **1,500-400k-$600k annualised. No automated tooling matches that conversion rate on this size of list.
- The failure type tells you the playbook. Insufficient-funds declines (#1) are best handled by waiting 3-5 days then retrying via account-update. 3DS timeouts (#2) are usually one-off and a simple “want to try again?” email works. Fraud-rule declines (#3) need a sales rep to manually approve via the BC admin. Network drops (#4) recover with a single nudge. CVV mismatches (#5) suggest the customer mistyped, easy email fix.
- The geographical / payment-method dimension reveals checkout breakage. All UK / EU customers on this list show
Incomplete(notDeclined). That points to a 3DS / SCA configuration issue specific to non-US traffic, the gateway is initiating 3DS but the storefront is timing out before the bank challenge resolves. Investigate the 3DS iframe behavior on UK traffic before this gets worse. - The PayPal Express decline (#3) needs special attention. PayPal fraud rules are opaque; a single decline can mean “PayPal flagged this customer’s account”, not “the merchant did something wrong”. Don’t tighten merchant-side fraud rules in response, just offer the customer an alternative method.
- Open this card with coffee, before checking email. It’s the highest-impact 90 seconds in the day.
- Click the top 2 names to open the per-customer recovery view (Vortex Mind’s daily-revenue-leakage report). Each click gives you the customer’s full attempt history and a draft outreach email.
- Send personal email or call within 30 minutes of arriving at desk.
- Mark recovery status so tomorrow’s list isn’t polluted by yesterday’s already-handled names.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Top Unrecovered Today |
|---|---|
| BC Repeat Failure Customers | The multi-attempt cohort. Customers on this card who appear on the repeat-failure card too need extra-priority human contact; they have shown more intent than a single failure suggests. |
| BC Size of the Prize | The 30-day aggregate. Today’s top 5 is a slice of the running 30-day total; the daily list adds up over time. |
| BC Failed Orders Value | The 30-day failed-value headline. Today’s top 5 is typically 5-15% of the 30-day pool. |
| BC Decline by Payment Method | Cross-cut: if today’s top 5 are all on the same payment method, that method is structurally broken. Treat as a lead indicator. |
| BC Failures by Channel ID | Same logic at the channel dimension. If today’s top 5 cluster on one channel, that channel had a deploy or config problem yesterday. |
| BC Organic Recovery Rate | Helps you decide which entries to prioritise. If your store has high organic recovery (40%+), some of today’s top 5 will self-recover; focus human effort on the ones that won’t. |
| Customer Segments | Cross-reference: are today’s top 5 high-LTV existing customers (urgent) or new prospects (still important but lower-priority sequencing)? |
| BC Top Customers | If a top customer is also on this card, that’s an account-management emergency, route to their named CSM, not the generic recovery queue. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in BigCommerce Control Panel: Orders → All orders filtered to statusDeclined and Incomplete, date filter set to “Yesterday”, sorted by Total descending. The top 5 should match this card to within 1-2 entries (timezone effects on the day boundary).
Other BC views that look adjacent but miss the point:
- Storefront → Abandoned carts: tracks pre-checkout abandonment, not failed-checkout orders.
- Customers → Recently viewed: not failure-related.
- Analytics → Sales by date: shows successful sales only.
- Channel Manager → Activity log: per-channel sync status, not order-level recovery.
| Reason | Direction |
|---|---|
Recovery filter. We exclude entries where any_recovered = Yes (the customer self-recovered overnight). Manual export of “yesterday’s failures” includes them. | Vortex IQ LOWER count than naive yesterday-failure exports |
| Time zone. “Yesterday” = previous UTC day. Store-local “yesterday” may differ by ±1 day at the boundaries. | ±1 day at boundary |
Cancelled exclusion. We exclude Cancelled entries (merchant voids); some manual exports group them with declines. | Vortex IQ LOWER if merchant counts cancelled |
| Top-5 truncation. The card surfaces only the top 5; full list is available via the daily-revenue-leakage report. | Card shows fewer entries by design |
Currency mixing. Sort is by raw total_inc_tax. A multi-currency store may rank entries in a way that is not strict dollar-equivalent. | Cosmetic; revenue capture is still correct |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
klaviyo.klaviyo_at_risk_today | Klaviyo’s daily abandonment-flow trigger list overlaps with this card | Klaviyo includes pre-checkout abandonment too; this card is post-checkout failures only. |
stripe.stripe_top_failed_today | Stripe’s per-day failed-charge list maps to the credit-card subset of this card | Stripe sees only Stripe-routed payments; this card sees all gateways. |
paypal.pp_top_failed_today | PayPal-side equivalent | PayPal account email may differ from BC billing email. |
Declined + Incomplete + recovery-join + daily ranking shape is BC-specific. Other commerce platforms have similar data but the cumulative-state recovery filter is BC-only in our current build.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why only 5 entries? Because more than 5 entries dilutes the human attention. The 90-second morning briefing depends on a list short enough to read fully and act on each entry. The full daily list is in the Vortex Mind daily-revenue-leakage report; this card is the executive summary. 5 entries = 1 minute to triage = 30 minutes of human follow-up = 30-50% conversion. That ratio is what makes this card valuable. An entry disappeared from today’s list, where did it go? The customer recovered. Each sync re-evaluates the recovery flag, if a customer who failed yesterday has now succeeded (within the 30-day window), they’re removed automatically. This is intentional: you don’t want to spend human follow-up time on customers who have already converted. The same customer keeps appearing on this list day after day, what should I do? Stop emailing them, start calling. A customer who fails repeatedly across multiple days is structurally blocked, retry won’t fix it. Common causes: corporate-card fraud rules, card expiry rotation, BIN-level decline, fraud-rule mis-configuration on your side. A 5-minute phone call almost always uncovers the root cause; an automated email never will. Cross-reference with BC Repeat Failure Customers for the full multi-day view. Should I A/B test outreach copy? Not on this list. The volume is too low (5 names/day) for statistically meaningful A/B testing. Test on the broader unrecovered cohort (the BC Size of the Prize base list) where you have hundreds of names; bring the winning variant back here for the high-touch top 5. My top entry is $5,000+, who handles it? Whoever runs your highest-value-customer relationships. For most BC stores that’s the founder or a sales lead, not customer service. Five-figure failed orders are not a “send a recovery email” event; they’re a “personally call the customer within 1 hour” event. Treat the size of the entry as the routing rule. Why is the list always full of credit-card declines? Because credit cards are still 50-70% of BC checkout volume in most regions, so they generate the most absolute failures. Wallet payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay) are over-represented in successful orders and under-represented here, which is exactly why merchants should push wallets prominently. My store is multi-currency, the rankings look weird, why? The sort is on rawtotal_inc_tax. A 1,000 EUR failure ranks higher than a $1,000 USD failure even if EUR is weaker against USD. For multi-currency stores, prefer the per-currency views in the daily-revenue-leakage report rather than the consolidated card. A currency-normalised version of this card is on the BC roadmap.
Can I export this list to a CRM?
Yes. Vortex IQ exposes this list via the BigCommerce API (subject to BC’s rate limits) and via daily CSV export from the Vortex Mind daily-revenue-leakage report. Most merchants pipe it into HubSpot, Salesforce, or a Slack channel for the morning shift.
Why does my list sometimes show only 2-3 entries?
Either (a) yesterday was genuinely a quiet day with few failures, or (b) the data hasn’t fully indexed yet (typical 5-15 minute delay after midnight UTC). Check back in 30 minutes; if it’s still short, your store really did have a clean day. A short list is good news.
A POS terminal entry is on this list, can I really email a POS customer?
Probably not, POS customers usually don’t have email captured (it’s optional at the till on most BC POS configurations). The card surfaces them anyway because the order is technically unrecovered, but the actionable list for human outreach is the email-bearing rows. Rank them by attempted value among entries with a populated email.