As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, retailers are looking for ways to rebound and capitalize on pent-up demand for products and services.

With more people opting to shop online than ever before, an obvious place to start is to make it easier for customers to buy. Unfortunately for retailers, the complexity involved in onboarding and managing multiple, emerging forms of payment is daunting at best, prohibitive at worst.

Supporting preferred payment methods during checkout, however, is critical for retailers to deliver the personalized, frictionless and expedient e-commerce experiences customers crave. Let’s explore what retailers need to know.

The Practical Challenges of Payments

At a macro level, the market is evolving fast. The growth of e-commerce has decreased reliance on cash, and there’s increased penetration of mobile devices and government encouragement of digital economies. Plus, COVID-19 has driven a sea change in consumer behavior.

These developments have given rise to a host of new payment types. Among them are digital wallets, online cash applications, buy now pay later (BNPL) solutions, QR code payments, money transfers, instalment payments, and cryptocurrencies.

For retailers, these new payment types present both an opportunity and a challenge. While it’s an advantage to give customers a choice in how they pay for a product or service, it can be laborious to negotiate with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) as well as time consuming and costly to accommodate their different APIs and functionalities.

Consider the Geographic Complexity

With e-commerce knowing no boundaries and open banking initiatives providing favorable trading terms, many retailers want to expand to new markets. However, that requires deep, localized knowledge and technical and linguistic skills that many don’t have. That’s because every country worldwide has a unique payment landscape shaped by history, socioeconomics, culture and government regulation.

In India, Indonesia, and Mexico, for example, many citizens are underbanked. They have to rely on alternative financial services such as money orders, check-cashing services and payday loans to manage finances and fund purchases.

Similarly, underdeveloped countries whose financial systems lack basic payment processing capabilities have developed their own mobile payment solutions to compensate. Countries such as China, Germany, the United States and more have also pioneered a raft of mobile payment options. Simply put, payment methods today are often country-specific and won’t necessarily work everywhere.

Don’t Forget Compliance and Regulation

In Europe, the EU General Data Protection Regulation mandates the local storage and management of citizens’ payment data. India and Brazil boast similar regulations. Meeting these diverse requirements is a significant challenge and requires cloud-driven Edge computing capabilities that bring computation and storage closer to the sources of data.

Adding a new local payment type isn’t as simple as just turning it on. Retailers entering a new market need to ensure they comply with local regulations governing the use and storage of citizen data. The risk of noncompliance, as some unwitting payment companies and networks have found, is sizeable fines.

Cloud Technology is the Future

Amidst all these challenges, there’s good news. There is now a way for retailers to quickly and efficiently onboard and scale new payment types without lengthy lead times, localized knowledge, or costly development resources. Cloud-native payment orchestration platforms (POPs) have emerged that replace legacy payment infrastructures and systems and streamline and manage payment methods, services and transactions in one place.

Cloud POPs enable businesses to seamlessly and compliantly introduce local payment methods as soon as they enter the region or country. With a cloud-based POP, retailers get their own Instances, which become a retailer’s individualized infrastructure and payment platform in the Cloud. They can then take these Instances, and thanks to cloud computing, spin up an Edge to their Instance in any region. These Edges provide significant benefits, ensuring retailers can offer local payment methods that meet regulation, keep customers’ data secure within the country while still offering the payment methods consumers demand. As a result, retailers can build satisfaction and loyalty by supporting customers’ preferred payment methods at the outset.

Yes, retailers face multiple challenges when setting themselves up to accommodate today’s payment methods. What they need is a cloud-native POP solution that can integrate and manage all payment forms in one place and facilitate entry into new markets virtually at the click of a button.

If you’re growing globally and want to test new payment methods in local markets without hiring a team of engineers, check out the Gr4vy platform.

This article first appeared on TotalRetail

Why is payment orchestration suddenly getting so much attention? The truth is, it’s not a new idea, but what is different is the accelerated drive toward digital transformation and the advantages of cloud computing.

Payment orchestration is no longer optional. Before COVID-19, retailers had options. Digital transformation was back of mind, but it wasn’t a top priority. Retailers knew 15% of their business was digital, and their ecommerce channel was growing. However, it was the other 85% of the business that had a retailer’s attention.

Then the pandemic happened, and everything changed: 15% of a retailer’s business quickly became 90% to 100% of the business. The global supply chain fractured. People turned to online shopping in droves. A retailer’s digital ecommerce channel suddenly became critical for growth. Today, the companies that are thriving are the ones that changed and adapted.

Surprisingly, how retailers manage and handle payments has not changed; it’s decisively stuck 20 years in the past. To ultimately transform, retailers need flexible, scalable and customizable payment infrastructure.

A No-Win Payments Scenario

Astoundingly, every company that sells online is building or has built exactly the same piece of payment software, software that is just enough but nowhere near good enough for true digital transformation. This software is generically called “payment orchestration.” Why? Because it routes clients’ payments to wherever it needs to go.

It starts simply. Retailers want to sell online, so they sign up with a Payment Service Provider (PSP) that processes credit cards. Their developer integrates them into the company site. The realization then hits that new payment methods are required, such as PayPal or Apple Pay. Then local, regional and global payment methods come into play. The retailer, for example, wants to launch into Germany or expand to Asia where customers prefer not to pay with credit cards and want to pay after delivery, do direct debits or pay in installments.

The retailer’s PSP doesn’t do any of this, so they have to find a new or additional PSP. All integrations then become the mandate of the retailer to add to the payment roadmap. Meanwhile, the payment team is frustrated, accounting can’t scale efficiently under the demand to reconcile reports, and the retailer’s developer can’t stick everything together.

Furthermore, the retailer wants to move from a shopping cart solution installed on a server in a data center to a cloud-based solution. Still, they need both systems, as some legacy processes have to run on their hardware. The result? Retailers end up with a compromise solution, full of workarounds, long lead times, excessive maintenance costs and legacy hosting costs.

What’s the solution?

1) The Cloud is the Future

The future of technology is in the cloud. Retailers need a payment orchestration platform that works both today and wherever digital commerce takes them in the future. Shopping carts are going headless and cloud-based, as are stock control, shipping and even warehousing solutions. In the not too distant future, retailers won’t own a single server. Retailers can’t repeat past mistakes with an orchestration platform that locks them into a single provider with a single point of failure. PSPs have highly scalable redundant platforms; bolting a single point of failure on top introduces unnecessary risk. To take on digital transformation, retailers need to choose a platform that works now, will work with their infrastructure in the future, and functions wherever and however it’s deployed.

2) Simplify Compliance and Regulation

Retailers must prepare for compliance and regulation. Adding a local payment method is not as simple as just turning it on. Being able to operate in certain countries entails a load of local and regional compliance requirements around what retailers do and how data is stored. For any retailer with international e-commerce, this is getting harder — with countries and regions setting local rules and regulations that are far more stringent than what most retailers have deployed. When selecting a payment orchestration platform retailers must make sure it keeps them in local compliance, is cloud based and can process data on the edge.

3) Nimbleness Matters

Retailers need to be nimble. The world of payments is getting more complex. New, exciting payment methods have arisen such as wallets, installment payments and QR code checkouts, and there’s more on the way. For example, Open Banking in Europe has been slow in adoption due to implementation complexity. However, its adoption will increase due to rising interchange rates and benefit retailers with free and chargeback-resistant payments.

A retailer’s platform must enable them to pick, test and deploy these new payment types quickly and simply, with a no-code interface and no need for developers to be involved. Deploying these new payment types will cause very little friction to backend accounts and fulfillment teams. A cloud-based payment solution will unify reporting, irrespective of payment type.

4) Scale for Simplicity

Retailers need to select a payment orchestration platform that makes things simpler and then gets out of the way. Imagine being free from the burden of an annual PCI audit. Retailers must choose a platform that holds payment data and won’t lock them into a proprietary tokenization system. They need to select a solution that maintains their payment providers, changes in reporting, and updates security protocols. Basically, retailers need an “integrate once and don’t worry about it again” platform.

5) Identify Growth Opportunities

Payments experts are in short supply. Retailers need a platform that offers support. Retailers are leaving business on the table by not supporting customers’ preferred ways to pay. The platform a retailer chooses should optimize conversion rates at a cart level and at checkout. The right platform advises and recommends how to increase sales and decrease costs as a retailer’s business grows and expands.

So why is now the time for payment orchestration? Retailers needed it before, but now they can’t win without it. Retailers must choose a solution that turns payments into a strategic advantage and enables digital transformation with ease.

Gr4vy’s POP leverages the power of the cloud to give users the capability to streamline and manage payment methods, services, and transactions all in one place. Its orchestration layer upgrades a company’s payment stacks to make infrastructure nimbler. While its intuitive, no-code dashboard centralizes the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions. With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again.

For more information, please visit gr4vy.com/

This article first appeared on Retail TouchPoints