Fact or Fiction: Can There Be a Best Payment Gateway?

What payment gateways are you opting for to optimize your payment stack?

It can be easy to fall into the trap of trying to decide which payment gateway is the very best for your business, when in reality, you likely need multiple different ones. Growing businesses with international aspirations can especially benefit from a multi-provider approach.

An open payments platform gives you the operational flexibility to integrate multiple gateway solutions and achieve a fully-realized multi-provider ecosystem. With the freedom to choose from many different connections, you can build a tailored payment environment. 

What Factors Impact the Usefulness of a Payment Gateway?

The success of your chosen payment gateway depends on how well it aligns with your needs.

Several critical factors must be taken into consideration when choosing a payment gateway for your business. Analyzing the following factors can help you in establishing a solution that removes friction from your payment process, even during times of high volume or growth:

Geographic Location

Your geographic location significantly impacts the effectiveness of payment gateways. 

Gateways must cater to the payment preferences and regulatory requirements of the region where the business operates. For instance, a gateway serving a European business is more likely to offer support for local EU card networks and have native support for government regulations like GDPR and PSD2., while one operating in Asia might instead offer QR code payments and integrate with local wallets. 

Many regions also have localized payments to consider, such as iDEAL in the Netherlands. Local payments come with their own regulatory and operational considerations, such as how your business can accept these payments if you reside in a different region. 

Integration Flexibility

Your business continuity depends on your payment gateway’s ability to integrate with existing systems. Gateways offering API-driven integration provide businesses with the flexibility to customize workflows and adapt the gateway to specific operational needs. 

APIs can also reduce manual work for your development or technical team, allowing you to launch new gateway connections quickly for faster market entries. 

Moreover, the ability to process different types of payment methods in multiple currencies has become one of the most essential capabilities for modern growing businesses. A payment gateway with multi-currency capabilities simplifies transactions for customers and helps businesses avoid the complexities of currency conversion.

Reliability and Cost-Efficiency

A slow or downed gateway can lead to loss of revenue from increased transaction failures. 

Issues like sluggish authorization rates and high cart abandonment can become more prominent should you find yourself with an unreliable payment gateway. Even when the gateway works perfectly, you may find yourself having to deal with high fees that disrupt your cash stability. 

Increasing gateway reliability can often require the ability to integrate multiple different gateways at once. Doing so means you can configure automatic reroutes to secondary gateways should your primary gateway experience downtime or a failure.

Secondary gateways also make it possible to route transactions for maximum cost efficiency. You can choose to send specific payments to specific gateways based on the lowest fees and operational costs. 

How Can a Multi-Provider Payment Strategy Be Achieved?

Rather than choosing just one gateway, you should opt for a multi-provider approach.

But how can you achieve this?

Integrating multiple payment gateways requires a digital environment built for flexibility and vendor agnosticism. Open payments platforms offer all of this and more via a centralized payment environment designed to support an ecosystem of different technologies and providers. 

One of the key advantages of open payments platforms is their ability to streamline gateway integrations. Instead of managing separate connections to multiple payment gateways, businesses must only integrate the open payments platform, after which they can choose to enable any payment gateways or payment rails.  

This single connection allows them to access a wide network of PSPs and gateways. As a result, businesses can focus on selecting the providers that best meet their needs without worrying about the overhead of managing individual integrations.

A multi-provider strategy often involves routing transactions through different gateways to achieve better cost efficiency and other region-specific benefits. Open payments platforms simplify this by offering built-in smart routing capabilities. These platforms can automatically direct transactions to the most appropriate provider based on predefined criteria.

Open Payments Enhances Your Risk Management and Global Reach

Relying on a single payment provider can be risky due to potential outages and region-specific limitations. Open payments platforms mitigate these risks by enabling businesses to easily switch between providers when needed. 

If one gateway experiences downtime, transactions can be rerouted to an alternative provider, ensuring uninterrupted payment processing and creating redundancy that is critical for businesses operating in competitive markets where payment reliability directly impacts customer satisfaction.

Businesses operating in multiple regions also often require access to local payment methods and providers to meet customer preferences. With open payments, businesses can connect to a diverse mix of payment service providers, including multiple payment gateways configured to handle specific transactions that pass through the business system. 

No Matter Which Gateways You Prefer, Spreedly’s Here to Help

When we get down to it, there is no one single provider that can claim the title of “best payment gateway.” Each gateway offers different advantages based on factors like where your business is located and the types of payment methods you need to accept. 

As such, rather than choosing a single payment gateway to integrate, the key is to implement open payments technologies that can support a multi-provider solution. 

Spreedly’s open payment platform offers diverse connections to a whole world of payment service providers, including many leading payment gateways. 

Schedule a demo now to find out how Spreedly can optimize your payment stack. 

Download the Multiple Payment Gateways eBook Below