A payment gateway is a technology that securely authorizes payments for online and in-person transactions. Some businesses use more than one gateway to ensure continuity if one gateway fails, to reduce transaction costs through least-cost routing, and to maximize approval rates across regions.

Beyond redundancy, multiple gateways allow businesses to meet diverse consumer preferences, stay compliant with regional regulations, and use multiple gateway-specific features such as recurring billing or advanced fraud protection that best suit their transaction types and markets.

By using multiple payment gateways, businesses make their processing tools more flexible for more customers, expand their reach, and gather detailed insights into their transactions.

We’ll cover the pros and cons of using multiple payment gateways, how to integrate and support them, and features to look for while integrating multiple payment gateways.

What’s in this article?

• The pros of having multiple payment gateways
  
• The cons of having multiple payment gateways
  
• Comparing the difference methods for integrating multiple payment gateways
  
• How to support multiple payment gateways
  
• Essential features to look for when integrating multiple payment gateways
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

The pros of having multiple payment gateways

Using multiple payment gateways can help your business expand its global reach, meet different customers’ needs, and reduce risk. Here are some advantages to having multiple gateways.

• Maintain continuity and manage risk: By integrating multiple payment gateways, businesses create a strong infrastructure with continuity. If one gateway fails because of a cyberattack, technical issue, or routine maintenance, another can take over so transactions can continue. Because different gateways often have varied security features and adhere to regional regulations, businesses can spread their risk and maintain compliance with regulatory standards across borders.

• Expand global market reach: Each payment gateway supports different currencies, regions, and local payment methods. For businesses that operate internationally, using multiple gateways means they can provide localized shopping experiences across markets. For instance, while one gateway might support Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) transactions in Europe, another might efficiently handle popular mobile payments in Asian markets.

• Optimize costs: Transaction fees vary among gateways and across different transaction types and credit card providers. By employing advanced routing algorithms, businesses can select the most cost-effective gateway for each transaction. This method is known as “least-cost routing” and can lead to savings on transaction fees.

• Increase approval odds: Different payment gateways have different relationships with financial institutions and their underlying technology, which affect transaction approval rates. For example, a gateway with high approval rates for credit transactions in the United States might not perform as well with debit cards in Brazil. By distributing transactions across multiple gateways, businesses can increase their overall approval rates.

• Improve customer experience: By providing multiple options, businesses can meet customers' diverse preferences, build trust, and professionalize their checkout process. Some gateways also offer features that are especially useful for certain business models such as subscription services, B2B transactions, or selling digital products. This could include advanced fraud protection, recurring billing support, and detailed data analytics that can improve the transaction process and increase business intelligence.

The cons of having multiple payment gateways

While integrating multiple payment gateways is generally advantageous, businesses can face challenges with integrating, managing, and analyzing the insights they provide. Here are some issues that could arise:

• Operational stress: Each gateway has its own interface, settings, and integration requirements. Businesses must invest time and resources to manage them, make sure they function well together, and continuously monitor performance. Ensuring that all payment gateways work with the business's central systems can also require IT expertise and resources.

• Increased costs: Although using multiple gateways can potentially save money with competitive transaction fees, it can also lead to higher operational costs. Each gateway might involve its own setup fees, monthly charges, and transaction fees.

• Risk of negative customer experience: If not implemented cleanly, multiple payment methods can create a cluttered or inconsistent checkout experience—too many payment options, varying interfaces, or slower load times—which could hurt conversion. If transaction issues arise, resolving them can be more complicated with multiple gateways involved.

• Difficult data analysis: When transactions are spread across multiple gateways, aggregating and analyzing data can be more difficult. This decentralization can affect your ability to track sales trends, understand customer behavior, and make informed business decisions.

Comparing the different methods for integrating multiple payment gateways

How to support multiple payment gateways

After you’ve decided to use multiple payment gateways for your business, you’ll need to plan, configure, and continue to monitor operations. Here’s a look at the steps to get started.

1. Evaluate your needs: Determine which payment methods and locations you want to support, then research different gateways to compare their features, fees, and supported payment methods. Look for support for multiple payment methods such as credit or debit cards, digital wallets, bank transfers, and local payment methods.

2. Choose your integration method: Decide whether to use direct integration, a payment orchestration platform, a payment service provider (PSP), or a hybrid approach. Consider your technical resources, budget, and desired level of control, as well as the availability of developer-friendly application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) to simplify the integration process.

3. Implement and test integration: Follow the documentation and guidelines provided by each gateway or platform to integrate them with your system. Test thoroughly to make sure integrations are working correctly, and ensure adherence to industry standards that safeguard sensitive customer data, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Look for features like 3D Secure authentication, address verification, and advanced fraud detection algorithms to protect against fraudulent transactions.

4. Configure routing rules: Set up intelligent routing and load balancing to route transactions to the most optimal gateway based on transaction type, amount, currency, card issuer, or gateway performance. Also configure failover and retry logic so that if a gateway fails or a transaction is declined, the transaction is automatically retried with another gateway to avoid lost sales.

5. Monitor and optimize: Track transaction success rates, decline rates, and processing fees across gateways using a centralized dashboard that consolidates transaction data from all gateways. Adjust your routing rules and settings over time to optimize performance and cost efficiency, and ensure you have reliable customer support available.

Essential features to look for when integrating multiple payment gateways

When integrating multiple payment gateways with your site or application, look for these features to create the best payment process for you and your customers.

• Intelligent routing and load balancing: Create a payment gateway router to direct transactions to the most optimal gateway based on transaction type, amount, currency, card issuer, or gateway performance. This can help improve approval rates, reduce costs, and ensure redundancy in case of outages.

• Failover and retry logic: If a gateway fails or a transaction is declined, automatically retrying the transaction with another gateway can avoid lost sales.

• Unified reporting and reconciliation: Using a centralized dashboard or reporting system that consolidates transaction data from all gateways can simplify tracking, reconciliation, and payment analysis.

• Fraud detection and prevention: Look for features like 3D Secure authentication, address verification, velocity checks, or advanced fraud detection algorithms to protect against fraudulent transactions.

• Security and compliance: Make adherence to industry standards that safeguard sensitive customer data, such as PCI DSS, a requirement.

• Support for multiple payment methods: The ability to accept several payment methods, such as credit or debit cards, digital wallets (e.g., Apple Pay, Google Pay), bank transfers, and local payment methods, is essential with multiple gateways. This helps reach a global audience and cater to diverse customer preferences.

• Customizable checkout experience: Seek flexibility to customize the checkout process with your branding and user experience requirements, with options for creating custom payment forms, adding logos, and localizing languages.

• Scalability and flexibility: Look for a solution that can grow with your business and accommodate future changes or additions to your payment strategy. Consider whether you’ll be able to easily add or remove gateways as needed.

• Developer-friendly APIs and SDKs: Comprehensive and well-documented APIs and SDKs can simplify the integration process and allow for greater customization and control.

• Reliable customer support: Prompt and knowledgeable customer support can prove invaluable. This helps troubleshoot any issues that might arise during integration or ongoing use of the payment gateways.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.
  
• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.
  
• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.
  
• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.
  
• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.
  

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.