One of India’s largest intercity bus ticketing platforms partnered with Cashfree Payments to optimize its card payment stack and reduce transaction failures during high-traffic booking windows.

Results at a Glance

• Credit card success rate improved by ~4.8%
• Seamless card payment experience for millions of users
• Higher revenue capture during peak demand periods

About redBus

Founded in 2006, redBus is the world’s largest online bus ticketing platform. With operations spanning eight countries including in India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, the platform serves millions of travelers booking tickets daily, especially during holidays and long weekends.

At this scale, payment reliability becomes critical. Even small improvements in payment success rates can translate into thousands of additional successful bookings every day.

The Challenge: Payment Failures During Peak Booking Windows

In India, while roughly 30-35% of travel bookings are made using credit cards, they account for up to 60% of the total transaction value due to higher average ticket sizes.

This makes delivering a seamless card payment experience a critical requirement for travel platforms. As redBus scaled its transaction volumes, card payment success rates began fluctuating during peak booking windows. For a travel platform where inventory is limited and seats sell out quickly, traffic spikes during these periods can lead to payment failures and lost conversions.

In such scenarios, even small drops in payment success rates can lead to lost conversions and revenue

Ensuring a fast, reliable, and friction-free card payment experience therefore became a key priority for redBus, to create stickiness and retain loyal returning customers. 

We conducted a detailed analysis of transaction failures across the payment lifecycle and implemented several optimization strategies.

Cashfree’s Optimization Approach

• Decoupling Authentication and Authorization Process
  During the analysis, we observed that success rates varied significantly across different processors, even when transaction volumes were similar.
  To optimize performance, We implemented a decoupled authentication and authorization flow, allowing different processors to handle each stage of the transaction.
  Processor 1 handled authentication
  Processor 2 handled authorization
  
  This approach helped leverage the strengths of each processor while improving overall transaction outcomes.

Impact: This strategy resulted in a 1 percentage point increase in success rates on Processor 2, directly improving revenue capture.

• Reducing Authentication Failures with Cashfree’s In-house 3DS Switch
  We enabled our in-house 3DS authentication switch for redBus, allowing authentication to be handled directly within Cashfree’s infrastructure instead of relying on external processors.This helped reduce authentication failures, minimize latency during peak traffic, and improve the reliability of card authentication flows.

Impact: redBus saw up to a 2 percentage point improvement in credit card success rates, especially during high-demand booking periods.

• Smart Dynamic Routing
  We implemented intelligent dynamic routing, automatically directing transactions to the payment gateway with the highest authorization success rates.
  This ensured transactions were routed through the most reliable gateway in real time, improving issuer approvals and final transaction outcomes.

Impact: Dynamic routing contributed to an additional 1 percentage point improvement in success rates.

Creating a Seamless Card Payment Experience

• CVV-less Payments for Returning Users
  Beyond backend optimizations, we also focused on reducing friction in the checkout experience for users. Entering CVV during checkout can become a friction point for returning users. We enabled CVV-less payments on tokenized cards, allowing returning customers to complete transactions without re-entering card details.

• Native OTP Authentication
  We also enabled a native OTP authentication flow, allowing users to complete OTP verification directly within the checkout interface.
  This eliminated redirections during authentication and created a smoother payment journey.

The Results

With these optimizations, redBus improved credit card payment success rates by ~4.8% with Cashfree, while also reducing checkout friction for returning users and enabling more successful bookings during peak demand periods.

For a high-volume platform like redBus, this improvement translates into thousands of additional successful transactions every day.

 "Our priority is to offer our customers a hassle-free and dependable bus booking experience. With Cashfree, we are able to provide faster, more reliable payment options, reducing failures and ensuring that customers can book their bus tickets with confidence, even during peak demand periods, ultimately making travel planning easier and more dependable for our customers” said  Srikanth Radhakrishna, Senior Director Product, redBus

Powering Payments at Scale
For high-volume businesses, even a 1–2% improvement in payment success rates can significantly impact revenue. Cashfree helps businesses reduce card declines and maximize revenue with intelligent payment infrastructure. Want us to power your payments? Chat with us!