The checkout page is a crucial step in the process for online purchases, no doubt about it. It is important to ensure the transaction has the highest chance of succeeding, while handling 3DS smartly by applying the right exemption requests – all of which payment orchestration can help with. But a successful customer experience goes beyond just the checkout page itself; the customer journey does not end once payment is complete.
Payment orchestration brings together the merchant’s systems and external providers so they function as an ensemble throughout this journey. Interfacing with order management or ERP systems ensures that up-to-date information on an order is always available, irrespective of whether the channel was online, offline, or hybrid. These systems are crucial to handling issues like a shipment not arriving or a customer using an online channel to return a store purchase.
Implementing a multi-acquirer setup is challenging, but it provides many advantages such as being able to cater to local market preferences, fallback options if a particular provider is unavailable, and smart routing to reduce fees and maximise acceptance rates by choosing the best provider for a transaction. However, the challenges should not be underestimated. Setting up the necessary multi-acquirer infrastructure is not a trivial undertaking.
When deploying a multi-acquirer setup, it makes sense to avoid reinventing the wheel. Implementing and maintaining integrations with each provider comes with significant overheads. The more providers, the higher these overheads become. A payment orchestration platform meets these challenges head-on, giving merchants access to a whole suite of providers and payment methods that have already been implemented and tested in the field, immensely simplifying adding additional providers at a later date.
Routing strategies are highly dependent on the merchant’s context – their product, region, whether they are operating in the retail or digital goods space, their vertical, regulatory requirements, and so on. These strategies are also restricted by the PSPs willing to work with the merchant – not all PSPs will work with all industry verticals.
At their core, all routing strategies share three common goals: maximising authorisation rates to increase revenue, optimising fees to ensure they are as low as possible using the best provider, and resiliency, so that if one provider fails, a fallback is available.
How these challenges are solved by merchants thus typically varies on a case-by-case basis, rather than by geography.
At its core, a payment orchestration platform is about connecting the merchant’s platform to multiple service providers and systems. An order may come in via Salesforce, for example, and then be forwarded to IXOPAY. From there, the transaction is sent to a fraud prevention system. If it passes the check, it is forwarded for authorisation, with the response sent back to the original system. Later on, the merchant’s order management or ERP system is updated with the transaction’s settlement status – if all steps have been successful, the order still needs to be shipped. Indeed, there is a complex interplay of various systems and actors.
There are near-synchronous and asynchronous aspects at play here. When a consumer clicks on ‘pay now’, that step needs to be nearly instantaneous, but returning settlement data to the ERP system involves additional processing which happens later. Depending on the product or business model, the setup can be more or less complex, and what is deemed ‘successful’ depends on the context.
Merchants selling high-value physical goods may place more emphasis on fraud management than on authorisation rates, but the reverse is often true when selling low-value digital goods. Directing this flow is at the heart of payment orchestration, and the ability to finetune how systems interact on a transaction-by-transaction basis is key to leveraging the full potential of the individual systems and actors.
When entering a new market, we typically recommend that merchants initially work with an aggregator. This allows them to determine which methods work well for them and decide which providers they should integrate directly, ultimately cutting out the middleman. This is a good way to test the waters before investing time and effort into the implementation and negotiating terms with individual providers.
At IXOPAY, we work with a number of partners, and this process goes both ways. As well as advising merchants on their options, we also work with providers whose customers want to implement payment options not supported by the provider. The merchant can use IXOPAY’s orchestration platform to integrate both the partner and additional providers using the same API. The implementation overheads are low, while the merchant gets access to the payment options they require while continuing to work with their preferred provider where possible.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Cross-Border Payments and Ecommerce Report 2022–2023, which taps into the fast-growing cross-border market and provides a comprehensive overview of trends and developments that are pivotal in this space, being the ultimate source of information for ecommerce businesses interested in expanding globally.
As VP Sales and Business Development for the leading Payment Orchestration Platform IXOPAY, Adam supports his global clients in designing and implementing scalable payment infrastructures. With an educational background in Computer Science and more than two decades in the Enterprise Software/IT space, in roles spanning from Software Engineer to CIO, Adam brings a holistic view, deep technical know-how, and passion for all things payments to the table.
IXOPAY is a payment orchestration SaaS enabling independent and scalable payment processing for enterprise merchants of all branches in a PCI-DSS-certified environment. Its extendable architecture offers safe and smart transaction routing, risk management, automated reconciliation and settlements, and a plugin-based integration of acquirers, PSPs, and APMs. IXOPAY is part of the IXOLIT Group.
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