What Is a Checkout Health Score and How to Use It
Dashboards are useful, but they can quickly become overwhelming: dozens of charts, filters and time ranges. A checkout health score is a way to compress several key metrics into a single number that answers one simple question: “Is my checkout healthy today?”
Why a health score is useful
A good health score helps you:
- Spot problems earlier than revenue reports
- Compare performance between markets and products
- Align teams around a clear KPI instead of multiple competing metrics
What to include in a checkout health score
There is no single formula that works for everyone, but most merchants combine three main dimensions:
- Approval rate – are issuers accepting your transactions?
- 3DS performance – are authentications completing successfully?
- Funnel & UX – are customers reaching the payment step and finishing it?
You can assign weights to each dimension based on your risk appetite and business model. For a subscription business, for example, recurring approval rates might be more important than first payments.
Example of a simple health score
One possible approach:
- Approval rate (weight 50%)
- 3DS success rate (weight 30%)
- Checkout completion (weight 20%)
You normalize each metric to a 0–100 scale based on your target or historical baseline, then compute a weighted average. Anything below a certain threshold (for example 80) triggers an alert or deeper investigation.
How PayLens can power your health score
With PayLens you already have:
- Approval rate over time across geos and devices
- 3DS success rate by country and traffic
- Checkout funnel showing where users drop off
That means you can build your own health score on top of PayLens data or let us compute a default score for you using best-practice weights and baselines.