The Advanced dashboard is the ultimate visual tool to keep you in tune with how your online business is performing. If you have physical stores as well, then you’re in luck, because the Advanced dashboard is fed by all your activity.

There is a wealth of information and graphics on the Dashboard. But before we get into them, let’s learn about some basic controls.

“Show” and “hide” controls

The first thing we should note on this page is the set of control switches at the top of the page that show/hide the different graphics on our Dashboard. Click the button circled below to access them:

Open

By default, all graphics will be ON

If there are too many graphics for your needs, simply click the switch to hide the ones you don’t need.

Another way to hide a dashboard is to click the Close (x) button directly on the graphic:

Open

Closing the graphic

Expand/contract

If you don’t want to completely hide a graphic from your dashboard but prefer to minimize its area instead, just click the expand/contract button directly on the graphic:

The graphic will not disappear, but will rather be available by clicking the same button to expand it.

Filtering - One click affects all

In the PayXpert Advanced dashboard, clicking an item on one graphic causes all the other graphics currently displayed to react to that filter too. This lets you view the graphics with your new angle in mind.

And so you know that you’ve filtered the rest of the page, that item stands out in red:

3 dashboards in one: Activity - Risk - Turnover

PayXpert’s Advanced dashboard is actually composed of three specialized dashboards. Here you can select which one you want to display:

• Activity: Perhaps the most pertinent dashboard, providing you with what you probably want to know first, it gives you an overview of the transaction activity for the selected period. It’s all about the number of transactions you’ve received in the period and the conversion ratio of those transactions. This dashboard lets you get a feel for the “traffic” on your website and/or the number of sales you’ve made in your store.

• Risk: the filters and the graphics on this dashboard are especially geared towards frauds, chargebacks and refunds. It helps you understand the most recent chargeback and fraud patterns stemming from the purchases on your website(s): where they are coming from and when they are arriving. Staying one step ahead of these problematic transactions is crucial towards minimizing losses in revenue and issues with your bank.

• Turnover: this is your earnings dashboard, designed to show you different graphics to help you understand your profits: where most of your business is coming from and the channels through which it is arriving.

We’ll go into the graphics on each dashboard shortly.

Main filters: Period length - Granularity - Analysis type

Notice the global filters at the top of the page:

These master controls control all the dashboards no matter what type of dashboard or graphic you are viewing:

• Period length: can be 1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months. By default it is set to 3 months, meaning that your dashboards will show information from the last three months (plus the current unfinished month).

• Granularity: this is the unit of time we use to generate your graphics and should be used in conjunction with the period length. For example, the standard period length is 3 months and the standard granularity is 1 month. This results in the bar graphs on the 3 dashboards being displayed like this:
  
  

  However, we could, for example, select a period length of a month (which would give us the last 30 days) and a granularity of 1 day. This would let us compare the transaction activity for each day over the past month:
  
  

• Analysis type:

  • Full period: considers the full granularity setting (e.g. the full month, week, or day) in each graphic:
    
    

  • To date: On the other hand, this is a special filter that lets you compare the current month to the last three months in terms of how you are doing on that day.
    
    For example, today is the 12th. In the full period display we cannot really compare our current month with the last 3 months because our current month has not finished yet. But if we filter “to date”, then days 1 to 12 of the last 3 months are shown, and now we can indeed compare the beginning of this month with the beginning of the last 3:
    
    

    Another practical use of the “To date” filter is to compare how you’re doing today with how you’ve done over the past month at this time of day. To do this we set our period length to 1 month, our granularity to day, and our analysis type to “To date”:
    
    

    And ouch, now we can see that our activity is low for this time of day . But at least our acceptance rate is staying up.
    
    

Remember that these controls can be used on (and affect) the Risk and Turnover dashboards as well.

Billing type

Notice the filters at the top-right of the page:

With these filters you can select which type of transactions you are interested in seeing on your dashboard:

• Bill: By selecting “bills” we will calculate the various graphics across the dashboards considering new transactions. You will see bill activity, risk, and turnover. We will not include rebills.

• Rebill: By selecting “Rebill” you are narrowing your transactions down to just rebills. Applying this filter shows you your rebill activity, your rebill frauds and chargebacks, and the turnover you are getting from your rebills

• 3DS: If selected, the dashboards only use transactions that went through a 3DS check to generate the graphics

• Not 3DS: if selected, the displays only include transactions that did not go through a 3DS check

By default, ALL types of transactions are shown (none of the above filters are applied).

Reset your filters

If you have finished drilling down on your data by selecting different filters and you want to refresh the whole Advanced dashboard without any filters applied, just click the filter button and select “Reset filters”:

This will let you start again from scratch.

About the different graphics

While some graphics appear in all 3 specialized dashboards, there are special graphics that appear only on their specialized dashboard. Let’s look at what each graphic contributes individually to these powerful, visual data-driven dashboards. We’ll also give examples of using the filters in each.

In all dashboards

The following graphics appear on all 3 dashboards (Activity, Risk, Turnover).

Payment methods

This graphic shows you the payment methods that have been used over the current period, in the order of their popularity:

Credit card brands

This graphic shows you the credit card schemes that have been used over the current period, in the order of number of transactions:

Networks

This section is only relevant to alternative payment networks handling bank-to-bank transfers. If you accept these types of payments, which are popular in northern Europe, then you will be able to see how many transactions went through each provider during your selected period:

If you do not accept bank transfers on your site, you will see “No data available” here.

Geographical repartition

Thanks to IP addresses we can tell you what countries your shoppers are based in. This intuitive area lets you see which countries most of your transactions for this period are coming from. Darker shading means higher numbers while lighter shading means less. But having said that, if a country is black, no activity (or chargebacks or turnover) came from that country:

The tooltips that appear when you hover over a country give you the exact numbers coming from that country for your selected period:

Remember that if you select a filter anywhere on the entire dashboard that this filter is reflected everywhere else. For example, if we select 2 months on the Turnover bar graph, and then look at our map, we will only see the turnover for those 2 months:

Clicking on a country

…And vice versa, if you click on one or more countries, the rest of your dashboard will only show you the data for those countries:

The Activity dashboard

Now let’s take a look at the graphics specific to our Activity dashboard.

Activity volume & Acceptance ratio (%)

This graphic does a couple of important things:

• It breaks your total transaction activity down into accepted vs. refused transactions:
  
  

   

• It shows you two important patterns in your traffic/sales:

  • Looking at the yellow line, we can see our overall activity… whether we’re improving our transaction volume, maintaining steady business, or doing less business. Notice how it follows the tops of the bars in the graph

  • Looking at the red line, we can see the acceptance ratio. This number is calculated by comparing the number of accepted transactions to the number of refused transactions. It is another measurement of our business, and perhaps just as important. As you can see in the image above, this current month we are experiencing a higher transaction success rate. And we can confirm that the green area, when compared to the blue area, is a lot bigger with respect to the same ratio over the last 3 months. So while our lower activity is disappointing, at least we’ve improved our acceptance ratio.

When you hover over a given time unit (remember that this is controlled by granularity), the exact details of that month or day or week are shown in the black tooltip: numbers as well as percentages of total transactions:

Activity per hour

By default this heat map shows you hours of the day with high or unusual transaction volumes. The darker the shading, the more activity for that hour of that day. In this example we can see that on the 19th of January during the middle of the day we had an unusually high volume of transactions submitted while over the rest of that business day we basically didn’t have any:

A 2-week period is shown on the left column but note that we can scroll up to move that 2-week window backwards in time:

But the Activity per hour graphic is not limited to transaction volume. Notice the selector, which lets us view different heat maps:

And here is where the real power of this graphic comes into play. For example, we can switch to the transaction refusal rate:

But refusal rate doesn’t give us the scope of how many transactions were actually refused. For this view we need to switch to Transactions refused per hour:

And now we can see very important info: the actual numbers of refused transactions. There have been a couple of points in the day over the last two weeks where that number has been severely high.

More details via sunburst graphic

And now we’re pleased to introduce you to a hidden gem of the PayXpert Backoffice: the Activity per hour sunburst, only available in the Advanced dashboard.

If you want more details for a given hour, just click it. A sunburst graphic will appear:

Within it, you can see, for that hour, a detailed analysis of the transactions composing the volume of that hour. The example image above shows how the rings on your sunburst graphic will appear by default. Each ring on the sunburst is a color-coded representation of the label on the right. For example, the response codes that the transactions resulted in is the first—the inner—ring, while the next ring to the outside is credit card brand. Notice in the image above that 75.86% of our transactions that hour were successful (response code 000, the first ring), and that 36.21% of our total were successful transactions and Visa branded. Looking at the 3rd ring, we see that 31.03% of our total were successful transactions, Visa branded, and in euros. The 4th ring, encompassing the whole area of the ring before it, tells us that all of the successful, Visa-branded transactions, in euros, for that hour, were not 3DS.

Let’s break down some of the other response codes. By hovering over the other parts of the “Code” ring we can see that:

• 6.90% of transactions for that hour were rejected with code 001 (Declined by issuer):
  
  

   

• 3.45% of transactions for that hour were rejected with an “Unknown error” (response code 999):
  
  

   

If we want to look at our data from different angles, we can change the arrangement of the rings on our sunburst graphic. To do this, all we need to do is drag and drop the labels:

• into the displayed or hidden item boxes:
  
  

• or by dragging a displayed item to the position we desire:
  
  

  In this way we can completely change the emphasis of our sunburst. In our example, we are now checking the response codes per issuer bank:

For example, here we see that all of our transactions for this hour were in euros:

This doesn’t give us much of an angle of comparison in our graphic, so we can hide it, using other items and rearranging them to give the sunburst more analytical impact:

Example

Using our sunburst intelligently like this we can get to the bottom of an issue like an unusually high number of rejections. For example, here we see that only 33% of our transactions were accepted!:

But what was the problem? Well, putting the rebill item in the inner ring of our graphic, we see that 100% of our transactions were rebills:

That was what caused the high rejection rate: 2/3rds of our rebills didn’t go through!

But what about on other days? With the selector we can zoom out and focus our attention on rejected rebills over a longer span of time. We can do this as:

• a ratio:

• or we can see the numbers of refused transactions directly:

Growths overview

Here is a simple little graphic designed to show you how you are doing this month compared to last, in terms of activity and acceptance rate. Hopefully you will see a positive growth percentage as in this example:

But look at our activity numbers. December’s activity is higher than this month’s. This is because we are displaying the full period. To compare the activity of each month up to today’s date, remember that you can select the “To date” analysis type at the top of your Advanced dashboard. This will tune our date to compare the months as they progress(ed):

The Risk dashboard

On the Risk dashboard we have special graphics for chargebacks, which really hurt business, and fraud alerts, which are important to be aware of. The refunds info there lets you monitor and predict how refunding your customers before a potential chargeback is filed helps minimize your risk.

Let’s start at the top-right of the dashboard. In this area is a series of 4 different graphics, all dealing with risk:

Chargeback rates by brand

The first graphic in this group is a set of simple gauges that show you the percent of total transactions, for each card scheme, over this month and the last 3, that were chargebacks. For this graphic we use the month the chargeback was formalized by your bank, not that of the original transaction (if different).

Notice that by default, the current month is selected, so the gauges show the current chargeback rates for your current month. Having said that, you can select another month (or multiple months) in order to view the chargeback rates of those months (or combinations of months):

Chargebacks, frauds & refunds quantities

This insightful graphic eventually serves to help you see if your refund levels are high enough to minimize chargebacks and frauds. The more refunds you can give, the less chargebacks you will usually suffer. If you see the amount of chargebacks arriving going up, be more proactive with your refunds in order to limit the number of chargebacks that may still arrive!

Unlike the gauges we just discussed, this graph is affected by your period length, granularity and analysis type filter selections. In this example, we are looking at the last 3 months (plus our current month), by week:

Amounts distribution

Before we go into this graphic, please note that it can either be for chargebacks or frauds, so pick one:

Also note that what is shown here is the period length you select on the left:

Now that you know what you’re looking at, let’s begin from left to right. This is a distribution graph that is indeed meant to be read from left to right. On the left we have the financial total of the contesting type(s) for that period length:

Moving to the right we have the distribution between rebills and bills that composed this contesting type(s). In our example, we can see that for this period’s chargebacks, most of them stemmed from rebills and not first-time transactions:

In the third column we see the distribution between card schemes for this contesting type(s):

In the fourth and final column we have currency distribution. From the graphic above it’s easy to see that most chargebacks were in euros. If we hover over a currency we can see the exact amount:

We encourage you to play around with this graphic in order to become comfortable with it.

Chargebacks and frauds to billing date

This graphic is a bit like the second one in this group but instead of viewing quantities, you’re viewing chargeback and/or fraud rates, meaning the % of the total transaction volume that ended up as chargebacks and/or frauds during that unit of time. Note that we tie the chargeback or fraud to the date of the original transaction. Also included in this graphic is a line there for turnover, so you can see how your business is performing overall.

In the above example, we can see that in July, we had a high turnover (we were processing a high number of transactions), and our percentage of chargebacks and fraud was lower/dropping. This was ideal in both senses. Then, over the next few months, not only did our total processing decrease, but our chargebacks and fraud rates started to increase. This was bad in both senses. Ideally we want to keep a high turnover while keeping chargebacks and frauds at a minimal rate.

What can we conclude from these graphics? We need to limit our chargebacks: this will no doubt get our turnover back up. How do we do that? Well, besides providing more refunds, we should try to generate authentically new business (limit our rebills):

Distribution by delay (in days)

How can we read this graph? Well, it is a view into chargebacks or fraud alerts (select a contesting type!) with respect to how long they took to appear after the initial transaction.

Note that you can narrow down the original billing type to “Bill” or “Rebill”. The same goes for 3DS and non-3DS transactions. By default we show you chargebacks (or frauds) coming from ALL billing types.

Now let’s look at the info that this graphic actually gives us. Here we can see that most of our shoppers got the chargeback finalized within 5-10 days of our transaction.

But as we can see on the last bar to the right, chargebacks can be made even 180+ days after the transaction! So be careful. Follow the recommendations in the related article to minimize your chargebacks.

Distribution by operation ranking

In this intricate but invaluable dashboard we can see, from bottom to top, at our 1st, 2nd and 3rd rebill attempts (if we had them)… in fact, up to past the 10th), the number of:

• contestations for that rebill attempt (chargebacks or frauds, depending on what you selected)

• successful captures of those rebill attempts

And on the right side of the graphic we can see the corresponding rate (the ratio of contested rebill to successful rebill in %). In the example above, 1 chargeback vs 26 successful rebills gives us 3.85%.

Amount & quantity

Here we have for each month (or otherwise unit of the period), the quantity (number) of chargebacks (or frauds, depending on the Contesting type selected) that arrived and the amount (monetary) that all the chargebacks or frauds for that month have costed us.

The bar, which is broken into parts for Visa and Mastercard, when applicable, represents the monetary amount of the frauds or chargebacks arriving that month, while the line represents the quantities of frauds or chargebacks for that unit of time:

As you can see in the example above, curiously in August we received the highest number of fraud alerts but it was one of the least costly months in terms of fraud.

Quantities by date of billing

In this simple graph we show you the chargebacks or frauds for each time unit on the X-axis. But note that we tie the chargeback or fraud to the original transaction, not to when it arrived:

Don’t forget that the Geographical distribution chart is quite nice to analyze the chargebacks from a given market. Just by clicking on a couple of countries, our whole Risk dashboard changes so that we can analyze just those markets.

The Turnover dashboard

Now let’s look at graphics specific to the Turnover dashboard. This dashboard is meant to help you understand the money coming in.

Turnover tree view

This type of graphic may be familiar to you from the Risk dashboard. But now, instead of looking at chargebacks and/or frauds, we’re looking at Turnover.

Looking at the distributions in the second column, we can see that most of our business this period came from bills (not rebills):

But we can understand more here about our turnover, like, by looking at the last column in the image above, that we had very little turnover in US and Canadian dollars. While we can see above that Visa cards composed more of our total turnover, looking closer now at these CAD, we see that we had more business there from Mastercard-branded cards:

Captures quantity and turnover

Here you can see the number of successfully “captured” transactions (the line) compared to your turnover (the bar) for the time units in your selected period. Normally there is a direct correlation, where the higher the number of successful transactions we have, the higher the turnover we get to enjoy. However, it is interesting to see trends like shown in the last bar to the right, where even though we do not have that many successful transactions yet this month, our turnover is comparatively high, at least for the moment. This could be because our customers are buying more expensive items, but probably because chargeback and refund season has not started yet for this month.

Also helpful is the Geographical distribution, which via hovering, gives you a quick dataset for a country, or by clicking, changes the 3 dashboards to reflect that market.

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