Can Shopify show payment approval rate by payment gateway?

Shopify cannot show payment approval rate by gateway on its own. Its payments reports count captured payments only, so failed attempts never enter the math, and decline reasons appear one order at a time. Approval rate per gateway needs successful and failed transactions side by side, grouped by gateway.

What approval rate measures

Approval rate (also called authorization rate) is the share of payment attempts a gateway approves. If 960 of 1,000 attempts are approved, the rate is 96%. Two numbers per gateway are needed: approved attempts and total attempts, with failed ones included.

What Shopify offers closest to this

Shopify has a Payments section in its finance reports. Go to Analytics > Reports, filter the category to Finances, open Finance Summary, and use Payments by gateway. The reports (Net payments by gateway, by method, over time, by order) show Transactions, Gross payments, Refunds, and Net payments for any date range. Shopify Payments stores can also use the Payments activity report, which tracks balance, fees, and payouts.

Why that does not give an approval rate

1. Only captured payments are counted. Shopify’s Help Center states that payments finance reports are based on captured payments. A declined attempt never reaches the count, so the report has no denominator. It shows how many payments succeeded, not how many were tried.
2. Decline reasons are not in the report. Shopify records a standardized error code on each transaction. Examples include 3D Secure authentication failed, insufficient funds, and card declined. The payments reports do not include that column. The reason appears in the payment events of a single order or abandoned checkout, so comparing gateways means opening records one by one. For a third-party gateway such as Mercado Pago, the detail available depends on what the gateway sends back to Shopify.
3. Retries and abandonment sit in different places. A failed attempt followed by a successful one shows only in that order’s timeline. A declined payment with no later success lands under Orders > Abandoned checkouts as a checkout, not an order. No native report links the two.

How Report Pundit covers it

Report Pundit reads Shopify’s transaction records, both successful and failed, so both halves of the formula sit in one report. The setup:

1. Start from the pre-made Payment Gateway Report, or build one in Custom Reports. Include Gateway, Status, Order Name, Order Date, Transaction Amount, and Kind, plus the decline reason column.
2. Set the date range, for example July 1 through today.
3. Filter Kind to authorization and sale, so capture rows do not inflate the attempt count.
4. Group by Gateway and Status. Approval rate per gateway is successful attempts divided by successful plus failed attempts.
5. Group by decline reason to see counts for each failure type, such as 3D Secure failures versus insufficient funds.
6. Sort by Order Name to find orders where a failed attempt was followed by a successful one. Those are the recovered payments.

Grouping by month shows how approval rates shifted when volume moved from one gateway to another.

One limit to know about

Abandoned checkouts cannot be tied to a gateway or decline reason. Shopify deprecated the gateway field on its abandoned checkout REST resource, so that attribution is no longer available. The Abandoned Checkout Report still lists abandoned checkouts, and its Completed Date shows whether each one was later finished, but it cannot split them by gateway. Failed attempts from shoppers who never completed an order are tracked on the abandoned checkout, so approval rates from transaction data reflect attempts tied to an order.