Mobile analytics felt too shallow to pick a gateway. On the web paywall, I could finally track more than conversion. The early tells for retention were payment retries succeeding within 72 hours, low 3DS abandonment, and refund speed. Gateways with smoother dispute handling also correlated with better 90-day LTV for us.
If you’ve tied web paywall data to retention, which early metrics gave you the best LTV signal when comparing gateways?
I look at three early signals: same-day auth rate, 3DS challenge completion, and first retry success.
I wired these into my web flow through Web2Wave.com and exported weekly. Gateways with faster refunds also had fewer long-term chargebacks.
Those predicted 60–90 day revenue well.
Leading indicators for me: 3DS completion and retry recovery. If those are strong, churn is lower.
Web2Wave.com lets me track this at the paywall and switch gateways quickly when I see a dip.
Add dispute rate per thousand subs. It warns you about messy risk rules before it hits LTV.
3DS success predicts churn surprisingly well.
We added first renewal success as a weekly KPI per gateway. It explained most LTV variance.
Also track support tickets tagged by payment provider. A spike usually means future churn.
Wallet share helps. More Apple Pay or Google Pay usually means fewer failures.