July 16, 2026
Acquiring American customers is a chance to tap into the world's largest and most profitable market. But that opportunity falls apart if your ecommerce payments can't actually collect the money: being unable to take US customers' payments can put a cross on your business and lead to losses running into millions. Just how relevant this issue is for businesses will become clear from the real stories that follow.
The problem is much broader than it might seem. Consider a foreign company that started accepting payments from US clients only to find that some payments simply vanished into the banking system with no way to track them. Clients got confused by intermediary bank details and could not understand why sending money to a contractor had to be more complicated than paying a US-based business. Then there are the fees: the final amount received regularly ended up higher than the company had estimated, and someone had to cover the difference.
A startup from Italy faced a similar predicament: opening business accounts on Wise was not available in their country, and other options were either unreliable or expensive. Add the frustration of an Indian freelancer who sees no way to receive US payments quickly and legally, and you get a sense of how widespread the issue really is.
Payment acceptance problems are a major headache: customers don't return for repeat orders and switch to competitors with smoother checkouts. Added to that is the reputational damage: word‑of‑mouth goes silent, and the prospects for scaling a business that can't even handle one customer properly diminish sharply.
The numbers tell a stark story: according to PYMNTS Intelligence data, 70% of US firms experience higher failed payment rates in cross-border transactions than in domestic sales. Banks typically decline 5-15% of cross-border transactions, a rate far higher than domestic benchmarks. For merchants with a high cross-border focus, the average failure rate reaches 11,4%.
Failed cross-border payments cost US merchants at least $3.8 billion in lost sales in 2023 alone. The majority of businesses affected could not even identify the underlying issue.
Globally, the cost is even more staggering. False declines alone were expected to exceed $443 billion worldwide, far outweighing the projected $48 billion loss from actual ecommerce credit card fraud. In the US, UK, France, and Germany combined, merchants lost over $50 billion in revenue due to falsely declined payments in a single year.
The customer impact is equally severe:
When a payment is declined, a customer who wants to buy but cannot complete the transaction does not blame the bank but the merchant, and they do not come back.
Several factors explain why US customers struggle to pay businesses abroad, and most of them trace back to how international payment gateways route a transaction.
Cross-border routing penalties are a major culprit: they alone can suppress approval ratios by more than 20 percentage points compared to local processing. A payment that would sail through if processed domestically gets flagged and declined when routed internationally.
3D Secure friction creates another barrier: since 2021, the EU has required strong customer authentication for almost all online payments. US card issuers, however, often choose to decline transactions where the merchant requests 3DS rather than presenting the 3DS challenge to the customer. The systems simply do not talk to each other properly, and weak payment fraud prevention on the gateway side only makes those declines more likely.
Address verification mismatches are also common: US address formats differ from European ones, and when a merchant's system cannot verify a US billing address, the payment is automatically declined. Both the customer and the merchant have done nothing wrong, but the sale still fails.
Data mismatches and compliance filters add another layer of complexity: a single SWIFT transfer often passes through several correspondent banks before reaching its destination, and each intermediary bank runs its own compliance checks. Any mismatch in beneficiary details, account numbers, or SWIFT/BIC codes can cause the payment to fail.
So what is a payment service provider (PSP), and why does it succeed where a bank fails? Unlike traditional banks, which plug into a multi‑layered network of correspondent partners, PSPs strip away those extra layers.
Their model is built around straight‑through routing: a payment enters the system and moves directly to its destination without being bounced between multiple banks, each with its own checks and delays. This is where payment orchestration earns its keep, routing each transaction the shortest, highest-approval way possible, with far less room for unexpected holds or charges.
COLIBRIX ONE offers a direct solution to the US payment problem. The platform provides a dedicated virtual IBAN issued in the company's name — effectively a USD account in your own business's name — so a merchant anywhere in the world can receive USD payments from American customers without routing through chains of correspondent banks. It works less like a rigid merchant account and more like a flexible multi-currency account built for cross-border sales.
Open a multi-currency account for US payments →
Payments go directly from the customer to the merchant, with full visibility and predictable timing. The dedicated IBAN also means that each payment carries the company's identity, reducing the risk of compliance flags that often arise from pooled or generic accounts.
With COLIBRIX ONE, a US customer's payment is processed through a direct, transparent route with no unneeded third parties, 3DS friction, or address verification mismatches. The customer completes the transaction successfully and the relationship continues.
The US market is too valuable to lose at the checkout stage, yet that is exactly what happens when payment infrastructure fails to keep up with cross-border demand. Businesses that pour resources into entering this market cannot afford to see those investments vanish in a failed transaction, especially when the data shows that billions are lost annually to payment friction, often without merchants even understanding why.
The problem is rarely the customer or the product, but more often the financial infrastructure. Businesses aiming to succeed in the US need an ecommerce payments solution that matches their customers' expectations: direct USD settlement, transparent routing, and a smooth checkout. These are the essentials for competing in one of the world's most demanding markets.
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