Merchants Mull Payments Orchestration as Downtime, Outages Disrupt Business

Digital payments are essential to making eCommerce happen, but they can sometimes be less than reliable. Payment provider outages can occur without warning and last hours at a time before the provider fixes them on the back end, and customers are unwilling to wait that long when they could simply visit another storefront.

It is a tall order for merchants and other companies to cope with these payment outages on their own, as implementing multiple payment gateways requires dedicated IT and payments staff at great expense. Many businesses are instead turning to third-party payments orchestration providers to remove the burden of payment gateway implementation and present a single stream to the customer, allowing merchants to seamlessly leverage an alternative payment gateway if one goes down.

These orchestration solutions appear as a single payments portal from the merchant’s perspective as well, significantly reducing the technical expertise needed to offer a range of payment gateways. Experts predict that the payments orchestration market will climb to $1.98 billion by 2026, marking a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27%.

In the latest Payments Orchestration Playbook, PYMNTS explores how payments orchestration systems can help eTailers implement multiple payment gateways to handle outages and downtime without introducing frictions into the customer or developer experience.

Around the Payments Orchestration Space

Relying too much on a single payment portal can significantly impact it if it experiences downtime for any reason. Elavon’s Interac payment service was recently down for six hours, making debit functions at several of Canada’s major payment terminals inoperable. This outage forced countless businesses to turn away customers who wished to use debit cards, resulting in incalculable losses for those that did not have cash handy. Elavon currently handles $300 billion worth of commerce, a significant fraction of which was unavailable during the outage.

The eCommerce field is more competitive than ever, especially as the pandemic results in record numbers of shoppers going online to buy everyday items rather than going to the store. One of the key ways to compete in this field is by offering seamless payments, according to recent PYMNTS research. There are several ways to go about this, including banking integration and payments orchestration. Both can provide seamless experiences and a large variety of payment methods, which can be a deciding factor for consumers in determining which eTailer to patronize. These systems can also aid in transaction monitoring and other compliance responsibilities, ensuring that eTailers’ time is better spent on value-add initiatives rather than playing compliance catch-up.

For more on these and other stories, visit the Playbook’s News and Trends.

Merqueo on Leveraging Payments Orchestration to Ensure Smoother Payments Experiences

Just as critical as the ability to offer digital payments is the ability to process them smoothly, but many eTailers fall into the trap of leveraging a single payment gateway. This compromises the ability to process payments smoothly when this gateway experiences downtime or some other complication, as shifting to a new gateway can be a colossal undertaking.

In this month’s Feature Story, PYMNTS talked with Cristian Niño, group product manager at Colombia-based on-demand delivery service Merqueo, about how the company leverages payments orchestration to provide a smooth payments experience for its customers.

How Payments Orchestration Can Help Merchants Cope With Payments Outages

Digital payments have become a must-have in the retail world as customers expect their favorite merchants to offer some type of electronic option besides credit cards. Payment card services can go offline unexpectedly, however, or a customer’s contactless payment method can fail to function for no apparent reason, potentially resulting in customer abandonment.

This month’s PYMNTS Intelligence examines how payments orchestration systems can reduce downtime to a minimum.

About the Playbook

The Payments Orchestration Playbook, a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration, explores the latest in the world of payments orchestration, including how these systems can help eTailers implement multiple payment gateways to handle outages and downtime without introducing frictions into the customer or developer experience.