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Metrics type: Supporting MetricsCategory: Ecommerce Platform
Lost revenue from declined / voided payments. The sum of order totals on failed orders.

At a glance

The total order value of orders in the period whose payment did not capture, declines, voided authorisations, and gateway errors. This is the money that would have banked had the payment gone through. It is the value counterpart of Failed Orders Count, and it represents recoverable revenue rather than money you ever held.

Calculation

Worked example

The same UK electronics store as the count card, Shopify Plus, Shopify Payments plus PayPal Express. The 30-day window covers 14 Mar 26 to 12 Apr 26. There were 91 failed orders in the window. Three things to notice:
  1. Value and count tell different stories. The 38 insufficient-funds declines are the largest count but the smallest value. The 9 fraud-filter voids are a small count but the largest value (£6,300), because high-value orders trip risk rules more often. Prioritise recovery by value, not by count.
  2. The £4,180 gateway-error cluster is the recoverable headline. Two large orders failed during a two-day processor incident. Had the gateway been healthy, that money banks. This is the clearest case for a follow-up payment link to those specific customers.
  3. Not all of this is truly lost. A portion of failed orders self-recover when the customer retries on another card, so the £19,100 is the gross recoverable pool, not a confirmed loss. The realistic recoverable share is the gateway errors, fraud-filter false positives, and a slice of the SCA drop-off. Use it to size the opportunity, then act on the high-value cases first.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against Shopify Admin

Where to look in Shopify Admin: Orders → filter to unpaid or voided payment states, then read the order totals. Shopify has no single report that sums failed-order value directly, so the manual reconstruction is to export the filtered orders and sum their totals. Shopify Payments stores can cross-reference Finances → Payouts transaction exports, where declined and voided attempts appear with their amounts. Other Shopify Admin views and why they differ:
  • Finances → Summary: reports captured sales and tax, not failed-capture value.
  • Abandoned checkouts: shows potential value of carts that never became orders, a different earlier stage.
  • Shopify Payments → Disputes: value of chargebacks on captured payments, a later stage.
Why our number may legitimately differ from Shopify: Cross-connector reconciliation:

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Is this money I have actually lost? Not all of it. It is the value that would have banked had the payment captured. A portion self-recovers when customers retry on another card, so treat the figure as the gross recoverable pool, not a confirmed loss. The genuinely recoverable slice is gateway errors, fraud-filter false positives, and part of the SCA drop-off. Why is the value high but the count low (or vice versa)? Failure value and failure count diverge because high-value orders trip fraud rules and 3-D Secure more often than small ones. A handful of large voided orders can dominate the value while contributing little to the count. Divide value by count to see the average failed-order size and decide where to focus. Is this the same as refund value? No. Refund value is money you captured and returned. Failed-orders value is money you never captured. They are mutually exclusive. Does it include tax and shipping? Yes. The summed total is the full totalPrice the customer attempted to pay, including shipping and (for inclusive-tax stores) VAT, the complete would-have-been order value. My multi-currency store shows a blended number, why? The card sums order values without FX conversion. Filter by currency for a clean per-currency failed-value figure. How should I act on this card? Sort failed orders by value, highest first. For gateway errors and fraud-filter voids on high-value orders, send a fresh payment link or call the customer. For SCA drop-off, smooth the checkout (enable Shop Pay). For routine insufficient-funds declines, a gentle automated retry prompt is usually enough. The card turns invisible payment leakage into a prioritised recovery list.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Failed Orders Value is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Shopify and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.