PYMNTS Intelligence: How Payments Orchestration Can Help Marketplaces Retain Merchant Customers

Consumers are craving digital payment experiences, the pandemic having whetted their appetites by expanding digital use to a wider range of retail transactions. PYMNTS research found that 30% of consumers are very or extremely interested in trying a new payment method, including digital wallets, QR codes or tap-to-pay.

Retailers are clearly concerned about losing customers if they lack digital payment options, and this concern is driving many to partner with platforms and marketplaces that can enable these experiences. What is less clear is how the marketplaces themselves can keep up with merchants’ growing payment demands. Payments orchestration can help these aggregators onboard their merchant customers faster, expand into new markets quickly and offer revenue-generating, value-added payments services to their customers.

Merchants demand that platforms support their preferred payment services. After all, they have established payment service provider (PSP) and gateway relationships they want to retain. If platforms do not support these services, merchants will go elsewhere.

Payments orchestration enables platforms to support virtually any payment service in a “bring your own gateway” model for their merchant customers. This means no waiting for internal development teams to build connections and enables them to focus developers on more strategic initiatives and salespeople on landing more merchant customers.

Merchants Need Smooth Checkouts

Merchants’ concerns about consumer loyalty are well-founded. More than three-quarters of consumers in a PYMNTS study admitted that a satisfying checkout experience influences their decision of whether to buy again from a given merchant.

Routing diverse payments to the correct payment gateways is essential to ensuring a smooth, payment-agnostic checkout experience, and this is what every marketplace or aggregator seeks to offer its merchants. Failure to do so can result in a merchant forgoing its relationship with an aggregator and exploring other options. Preventing this with in-house solutions, however, is a challenge for all but the largest platforms.

Payments orchestration solutions enable access to smooth payment routing, allowing aggregators to deliver seamless payment experiences to merchants’ end users. With every aggregator’s merchant customer base having a unique composition, customizable solutions are the best fit for most aggregators.

Adding More Value to Submerchants

With merchant customers relying on the platform or marketplace to connect and sell to customers, it is important for the platform to offer as much value to its merchants as possible. This can take the form of additional value-added payment services.

Services such as account updating and network tokens to refresh cards and keep customers transacting can offer additional incentives for merchants to use their platform partners. Smart routing and failover technology can also help avoid downtime and increase top-line revenue.