The Pros and Cons of Using Multiple Payment Gateways

It’s no secret that your digital business thrives on transactions. However, as soon as you've got more than one payment option in place, it can become difficult to track the performance of each individual option. The cost to integrate, manage and maintain multiple payment processors and gateways can be a bit expensive as well - are they worth it?

In this guide, we’ll break down the pros and cons of using multiple payment gateways and why additional payment service providers could be well worth the investment for your business.

The Pros and Cons of Using Multiple Payment Gateways

Pros

• You’ll offer a more enhanced user experience. For your customers, it can be quite annoying to find that your platform’s primary payment gateway does not accept a particular type of card. Adding an additional payment gateway is the easiest solution to this problem, and it can seriously improve your brand’s overall user experience.

• You can enter international markets. Having multiple payment gateways on your website can be quite helpful when you decide to scale your business and enter markets in other countries. That’s because you can integrate payment gateways that deal with currency conversion or use payment methods that are not very popular in your business’s base country.

• You’ve got more options in terms of overflow. If your primary gateway is down, your secondary payment gateways can handle the overflow instead of shutting your entire site down. Your customers can enjoy a seamless, interruption-free user experience, and you can enjoy mitigating the risk of lost profits during peaks.

• There’s the opportunity for business innovation. e-Commerce is growing steadily. As businesses and platforms continue to grow, those businesses will expand into new markets and need to build new business models. The support of multiple payment gateways can aid e-commerce businesses to introduce dynamic business models that can push them ahead of the competition.

• Your conversion rate will improve. Different gateways have different specialized features. Make sure to conduct thorough research to find providers that have the right solutions to boost your conversions. Things like one-click features, recommended coupon codes, and other gateway perks make it much easier for your leads to become actual customers. When it comes to this, it’s important to be open to feedback from your customers to ensure that the specific gateway solution you’ve implemented is aligning with your target market’s needs.

Cons

• You’ll have to juggle multiple vendors and contracts. For each payment service provider that you decide to work with, you’ll have to manage individual contracts, licenses, business relationships, etc. That’s rarely a problem for larger businesses, but small business owners may struggle to balance them all.

• You’ll need a more powerful system. Traffic needs to go to different gateways, and it won’t do so automatically. You may have to invest in a developer that can designate automated rules for your system’s traffic to make sure everything is seamless.

• Volume pricing discounts are a thing of the past. Gateway pricing is based on sales. If you’re using multiple gateways, that means you are splitting your sales among two or more gateways. This can make it difficult to reach the required volume needed to receive reduced pricing.

• They can be costly. Different vendors offer varying degrees of quality gateways. Just as well, these gateways can take a lot of time or cost a lot of money. Try to do your research as thoroughly as possible to ensure you aren’t paying for a gateway service that isn’t meeting the mark.

Should I Use Multiple Payment Gateways?

If you have development resources and a robust enough infrastructure, we’d have to say that using multiple payment gateways is well worth it. However the challenges associated with integration, lack of visibility across multiple sources and the administrative overhead can be difficult to manage. The alternative is to use a system that can help address these challenges, like GBLPay, which has the ability to rapidly add multiple payment gateways and processors without the need for complex code. GBL Pay can handle both Fiat and Bitcoin all under one platform while viewing all your payment sources through a single unified dashboard.

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