When the whole world faced the danger of shutting down due to COVID-19, smart businesses migrated from brick-and-mortar to click-and-order model to up their scale. What attracted the most was the low entry-cost combined with the high customer reach.

COVID-19, become a blessing in disguise for businesses where it forced people to stay at home with virtually little to do except surf the net and order as much as they can even for basic normal day household items.

Impressive growth in online sale during pandemic was possible only due to ever increasing list of diverse apps and third-party payment service providers (PSPs) facilitating easy payment processing. Ubiquitous mobile phones have become the modern day POS (Point of Sale) machines where people order anything while on the move.

According to an estimate more than 65% of merchants have no data to explain why transactions of their customers fail. This is the biggest pain E-commerce merchant attribute when they expand into new markets. Thus failed transactions are one of the biggest challenges retails face.

As online shopping is increasing, to support the growth there is an increase in investments in Fintech businesses especially the online payment technologies such as digital and contactless payment methods.

In fact there is not just increase in demand for convenient payment methods but there is also increase ing demands for newer payment options such as “buy-now-pay-later”  or “Instalment based”.

Another industry second to E-commerce retails which accelerated during pandemic and which also uses requires Alternative payment methods (APMs) is the online studying or the E-learning industry.

Lockdown forced educational institutions to close down preventing offline classes. To stay with time, they started online classes to keep their students and acquire new ones too. Additionally, lot of start-ups saw opportunities in the online learning domain and thus launched platforms where students/professionals can study and learn extra skills and enhance their careers during the lockdown and beyond.

Although there is a low entry cost for starting up your online webstore, deciding on which e-commerce platform and payment gateway services (PGPs) to adopt is a challenge. The success and the failure of your webstore depends largely on these two platforms.

As for the Ecommerce platform, one can either custom develop their ecommerce application or use one of the most popular ecommerce shopping cart applications out there such as WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Squarespace to name a few.

WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce shopping cart for WordPress CMS powering 23.43% of etailers webstores. Some of the popular payment gateway recommended for WooCommerce are as follow:

• PayPal
• Stripe
• Authorize.Net
• Amazon Pay
• Apple Pay
• RazorPay
• PayuMoney
• Square
• WooCommerce Payments
• Apple Pay
• UPI QR Code Payment Gateway (For Indian Customers)

Your preference for an eCommerce platform should depend on the features it offers to support your online business. For e.g does your eCommerce application have visual page editor, stock management, shipping cost calculation, payment gateway integration options, and marketing tools it offers to promote your business?

Once you have selected your webstore platform, next step is to select the payment gateway providers (PGPs) to accept payments online.

Large enterprises too are betting big in the online payment space such as Apple (Apple Pay), Samsung (Samsung Pay), Google (Google Pay) etc making the future brighter. As cash accounts for just 27% of retail payments from 69% back in 2007, it is only a matter of time before digital payments becomes the norm.

With the Internet, your customers can be from any where in the world. As customers become global with their own preferred method of payments specific to their region, you as an E-commerce retailers are presented with the challenge of integrating all such preferred payment methods into your platform.

This presents another challenge for E-commerce merchants while integrating different payment methods, some more preferred in specific regions than others, which is dealing with and complying the international payment regulations.

What is Payment Orchestration Platform (POP)?

To avoid such frictions, comes the Payment orchestration platforms (POPs) or the payments orchestration layer (POL). 

POP is basically a software layer simplifying the integration of web store and applications with various payment service providers. In simple terms it is a technical system for aggregating different payment services providers to manage transaction routing, validation and securing the payments from start (customer) to finish (merchant).

Providing support for different payment gateways, payment service providers can deliver a more robust and seamless experience for merchants and consumers alike. Some of the popular orchestration platform examples are Airwallex, Spreedly, XPAY, and XTRM. It is expected that the market for POPs will grow at least 20% until 2026.

Imagine the situation where merchants have to manually monitor the performances of individual payment gateways integrated in the absence of POLs. It will only add to the frustration, delay in time-to-market and resolve issue if any technical error arises.

Thus POPs are not just a life saver but also a revenue booster for the merchants by increasing the number of successful payments. The technology implemented to enhance the percentage of payments going through payment gateways is Cascading payment system.

What Are Cascading Payments?

Cascading payment is an arrangement where a transaction is routed to the best suited payment gateway to confirm the success of the transaction. A transaction is directed to an appropriate gateway or endpoint which has the highest chance of approval.

The cascading system is like a intelligent routing system which analyses and ranks all the payment gateways connected based on past failed transactions and thus routes a transaction to the gateway with most chances of payment going though thus increasing the profit for the merchant. 

With every failed transaction, the confidence of customer decreases and frustration increases resulting in them never returning to the merchant site.

Why do you need a Cascading Payment System?

The two most important reason to consider when makes the cascading payment systems important is the higher transaction success rate and reduced transaction fees. A transaction is routed to the best node with highest success rate and based on routing rules defined by the merchant, the transaction is routed to the network with the lowest rates.  

Thus when more and more transactions are successful together with low transaction fee, it adds to the overall bottom line for your online business.

Accept Cryptocurrencies as a Payment

In today’s time where cryptocurrencies are being traded aggressively and harder to ignore, they are threatening the normal banking systems and world economy. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, are applications running on underlying blockchain technology.

Making your Ecommerce store crypto-currency ready will add to your global acceptance, popularity, and revenue.

The crypto industry market cap is estimated to exceed $2.6 trillion.

With the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s giving a tacit approval for Bitcoin exchange-traded fund and with Indian Govt. coming up with their own cryptocurrency, acceptance of cryptocurrencies will hit a all time high in the coming years.

Some of the popular currencies are:

• Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Cash
• Ethereum
• Litecoin
• Binance Coin

Forrester conducted a study on merchants accepting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, on behalf of Bitpay – a leading provider of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency payment services, found that the merchants saves considerably on transaction fees as well as they attract new customers predominantly using cryptocurrencies.

Some of the benefits for accepting crypto-currencies are low transaction fees and very low percentage of chargebacks.

So, next time when you think of starting an online business to up your business value, decide on the right ecommerce platform and the best payment gateway as the success and failure depends largely on these factors.