The Pros and Cons of Using Multiple Gateways

E-commerce is booming globally, and it’s only just the beginning. To support hyper-growth and ensure your company gets a bigger slice of the growing e-commerce pie, you’ll have no choice but to add new providers to your payments stack. And you’ll need to do it continuously as you expand your operations and begin to serve new markets.

The Pros

Deliver your customers a better experience

Sustained hyper-growth on a global scale requires excellent customer experiences without exception. That’s no easy task! At the core of every excellent customer experience lies a convenient, trusted, and fast payments process. With multiple payment gateways and providers, you can offer your customers their most popular and trusted local payment methods and currencies. You’ll also be able to deliver a faster and less frustrating payments process as the use of local providers helps minimize declined transactions and latency times.

Optimize your payment flows

Different providers have different acceptance rates and charge varying fees for certain payment methods. By using multiple payment gateways and providers, you’ll have the capability to reduce processing fees and use providers which offer higher acceptance rates for certain transactions to minimize declines. You’ll also have several fallback options to ensure all transaction processing continues when providers experience failures or downtimes. During busy times with high payment volumes, this increased flexibility can save you millions of dollars in lost sales.

The Cons

Costly & slow provider integrations

Payment gateways have different integration processes with varying levels of complexity. To add new providers, you’ll need to hire developers or keep an in-house development team to code each gateway and integrate it successfully inline with core business systems and requirements. You will also have to develop rules and implement a custom built transaction routing system to direct transactions to the appropriate gateway. Having to develop custom routing systems and integrate multiple payment gateways continually leads to a constant drain on resources and slows the time it takes to start selling in new markets.

Management & administration

The management and administrative requirements involved with each payment gateway don’t end after integration. Vendor management is a significant and continuous challenge when using multiple payment gateways. With each addition comes a negotiation of contracts, a need to resolve any operational issues that emerge, and the ongoing management of relationships, all of which demands time and money.

Cumbersome account reconciliation

Merchants using multiple gateways and providers must reconcile deposits into their bank account to determine which gateway handled each transaction. The process of reconciliation is time-consuming and often prone to errors especially for merchants with high transaction volumes. For example, if a customer requests a refund, it can be difficult to establish where the original transaction processing occurred as there are several record sets to search. In contrast, merchants using a single unified payments infrastructure have only one place to look. Beyond these challenges, merchants may require multiple business accounts which cause further administrative demands as well.

Ongoing maintenance & development

Payment gateways need continuous support and often charge a monthly maintenance fee. When using multiple payment gateways, maintenance can become a drain on resources and even lead to lost sales as each gateway vendor will have varying standards when it comes to monitoring. There are also ongoing costs associated with development which are required for things like upgrades, adding new payment methods and other capabilities.

Low visibility & inferior analytics

Because data is siloed in different systems, merchants have no system-wide view of all payments activity. With no comprehensive view all payments data across your providers, it’s much harder to compare provider performance and understand what areas need to be optimized which ultimately leads to inferior business decisions. It also makes producing weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual payment activity reports more cumbersome.

Taking the pain out of managing multiple providers

The ability to rapidly integrate and partner with multiple gateways and providers is a necessity, not an option if you’re a hyper-growth merchant operating on a global scale. But it’s also a significant challenge to manage these providers if you don’t have the right payments infrastructure.

You need a way to manage, optimize and track new providers once they’re up and running. What’s needed is a unified, end-to-end payments solution that can help you organize your entire payments stack. A solution that can eliminate the cumbersome, inefficient, and costly processes associated with the integration and management of new providers but also optimize payment flows between these providers.

ZOOZ takes the pain out of managing multiple gateways and providers by letting you rapidly add, integrate, manage and optimize all your payments activities on a single platform. You’ll get to experience all the benefits of using multiple providers without having to devote valuable resources to integrate each one or deal with the management headaches that often arise. You’ll also gain the capacity to optimize your payments by setting rules to dynamically route your transactions and be empowered to make better business decisions with access to an analytics dashboard that features all you payment KPIs in one place.

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