Today’s e-commerce ecosystem is rapidly shifting, leaving merchants on uneasy ground. Consumer online spending habits and patterns have transformed due to inflation, cost of living hikes, and high energy prices. Consumers continue to reevaluate their shopping habits, while retailers hedge bets against the cost of doing business and the need to expand services.

While retail e-commerce sales worldwide are projected to grow by 8.9% this year and could reach as high as 8.1 trillion dollars by 2026, consumers continue to be wary, so even potential market promise doesn’t necessarily guarantee profitability. Regardless, retailers must overcome fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to realize that hard times open doors to innovate and adapt.

As the e-commerce landscape continues to evolve, it will be an absolute necessity for retailers to recognize the value of the online checkout and make payments a part of their strategy. By expanding payment options, building brand loyalty and using technology, retailers can bring about wins in today’s and tomorrow’s e-commerce ecosystem and keep consumers coming back to buy.

With consumers cutting back on non-essential spending, retailers need to close sales as every transaction counts. Retailers who want to take charge of the consumer buying experience would do well to accept multiple payment methods and work with and across multiple service providers – as a personalized payment checkout experience is necessary to encourage and entice consumers to buy. 

Diversify your portfolio with payment options to scale globally

Surprisingly, with so many advanced payment methods available, many retailers fail customers by limiting the number of advanced payment methods (AVMs) they offer. This approach is a ‘bottom of the barrel’ strategy, forcing consumers to seek brands that give them enhanced payment options to buy goods or allow them to pay how and when they want. 

Many of today’s current payment service providers (PSPs) also have proprietary APIs, requiring retailers to negotiate with every provider individually to add one payment method to their checkout. Add to this coding and integration complexities, and that most PSPs only offer the payment method itself without the infrastructure required to enhance the customer checkout experience, and retailers are hard-pressed to scale.

However, when the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is over 69%, retailers must offer all the payment methods consumers demand to keep customers from going elsewhere. A diversified and enhanced payment approach means offering options like digital wallets, Open Banking options, BNPL, and even considering cross-border payment options to enable customers to pay with methods localized to the region in which they live.

Make loyalty a core part of payments

Beyond offering advanced payment methods, retailers must also make loyalty a part of payments. For decades brand loyalty has correlated with keeping consumers coming back to buy, and it represents a significant opportunity for retailers to capitalize and increase brand loyalty when tied to loyalty schemes and payments. 

Already more innovative partnerships and offerings have popped up across the world. According to Research and Markets, loyalty and reward programs are rising and gaining market share in the Asia Pacific region. Demand for loyalty and rewards programs has also grown substantially in India, China, Indonesia and Singapore. And thanks to the rapid digitalization of payment systems, Latin America is seeing increased demand for rewards programs. 

Retailers who want to incentivize and support customers during difficult times need to look at how they can tie and utilize rewards and loyalty programs. This means examining their payment stacks and using technology to make it all feasible. 

Innovate through technology and payment orchestration

There is a saying, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s a phrase that is true for retailers looking to add all the payment methods consumers demand while enabling reward and loyalty schemes as a part of payments. To identify, add payment optionality and mitigate cart abandonment, retailers should turn to Cloud technology, specifically cloud-native payment orchestration and platforms (POPs).

Cloud technology has come a long way over the last couple of decades. Things that once were impossible, like hosting entire payment platforms and orchestrating payments, are now possible. Cloud-based POPs enable retailers to eliminate the need to run big mainframe servers or outdated legacy systems, as everything is done in the cloud. 

Retailers who use POPs can immediately plug in their systems and add new payment connections and methods without negotiating with PSPs, as everything is available in one place. Workflow automation also becomes easy as retailers can test new payment types and route them to their optimal endpoints depending on transaction value or geographical location. Also, when coupled together with the right POP, retailers can see data around customer purchasing behavior to enable hyper-personalized offers based on purchase history and a customer’s preferred payment method. 

Simply put, POPs take away any complexity to expanding and offering consumers the payment options they demand now and in the future. They empower retailers to adapt and innovate regardless of hard times. Fear, uncertainty and doubt disappear as consumers gain the ability to pay and buy irrespective of hardships – and that’s a strategy anyone can get behind to win in e-commerce.

This article first appeared in eCommerce Times

Last year, in the US alone, retail spending passed $1 trillion for the first time, with holiday spending in November and December growing by 20% year-on-year, and breaking $210 billion. According to ComScore, online grocery and apparel were the top spending categories, but the highest growth categories were event tickets (75% year-on-year) and digital content (60% year-on-year). 

Merchants face a number of high-volume trading periods throughout the calendar year depending on their product offering – for physical goods retailers, that could be an increase for DIY in Spring, back-to-school spikes in Summer, and gift purchases for the holiday season in Winter. For digital goods merchants, huge sports events, game releases, and even album drops can be enough to send e-commerce set-ups into meltdown. 

This year, Asia is expected to have the highest total e-commerce revenue at over $2 trillion, with the second highest at around $1.1 trillion being generated in the Americas. With e-commerce revenue continuing to grow across multiple industries globally, merchants must prepare or risk losing transactions on high-volume spending days. 

So, how can payment orchestration help merchants capitalize on increased consumer spending? 

1) No more legacy infrastructure with cloud-native payment orchestration

Most retailers haven’t touched their payment systems in over two years, making it difficult to keep up with consumer payment preferences and offer enough alternative payment methods (APMs) at the checkout. 

Retailers need a payments infrastructure that can plug in with their existing systems today and allow them to add new connections, payment methods, and workflow automation with minimal development resources. 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.

Cloud-native payment orchestration platforms (POPs) allow retailers to add a layer to their infrastructure that can orchestrate, and standardize all the payment methods required by consumers. Through this orchestration layer, retailers can add both traditional payment types, and other APMs such as Open Banking, BNPL, and digital wallets, among others. 

2) Dynamically offer consumers their preferred payment method and failover for different PSPs

Backend orchestration covers transaction routing to optimize for a variety of outcomes, including fraud prevention and authorization rates. If a payment service provider (PSP) goes down or can’t process a transaction, a merchant faces a loss of revenue and potentially the loss of that customer forever. Payment orchestration platforms allow merchants to have back-up PSPs in place to dynamically switch between providers without the customer having any friction. 

POPs can also orchestrate the frontend checkout experience. That is, everything a merchant’s customer sees throughout their experience with the checkout, offering a merchant the ability to dynamically filter and order payment methods offered to individual customers at the checkout based on the content of a shopping cart or preferences based on previous transactions.

For example, if a merchant is working with a payment processor through a payment orchestration platform that prohibits the purchase of certain products, such as alcohol and tobacco, metadata about the contents of the shopping cart can be passed to the POP who can ‘hide’ that specific processor from the customer at the checkout and push an alternative method forward, keeping both merchant and processors happy and compliant.

Likewise, if a customer has expensive electronic products in their cart, they might be a good candidate for alternative payment methods such as ‘buy now, pay later’ or open banking, so a merchant can set a rule based on transaction value (for example, $1,000+) to offer a provider for that method, such as Klarna, Trustly or Vyne, as “first” in the order of payment methods displayed to the consumer.

3) Mitigate risks of outages with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) 

The majority of payment orchestration platforms (POPs) on the market are built as SaaS instead of IaaS, meaning merchants are at the mercy of the SaaS provider’s security policies and have a shared tenancy. An IaaS model gives merchants a single-tenant cloud infrastructure with no single point of failure, ensuring they never lose a transaction. Merchants do not share infrastructure or server loads with any other merchant. 

While SaaS POPs may claim that having multiple PSPs on their platform removes the risk of having a single point of failure, if the POP itself goes down, every single merchant loses access to payments, resulting in a potentially significant loss of revenue. IaaS platforms, on the other hand, have a hugely reduced risk of downtime because it’s unlikely any of the large cloud services providers, such as AWS and Google Cloud, will go down in multiple geographies at the same time. In fact, when Google Cloud’s infrastructure went down in the UK during a heatwave in Summer 2022, Gr4vy, an IaaS payment orchestration platform, was able to immediately move all merchants to another region – whilst remaining compliant with data and privacy regulations – briefly until Google resolved its outage. 

If you’d like to learn more about the differences between IaaS and SaaS payment orchestration platform offerings or would like to learn how you can build a payment orchestration layer in-house, download our eGuide, ‘IaaS vs. SaaS: An e-commerce merchant’s guide to payment orchestration’, to discover which platform is best for your needs

Gr4vy is a cloud-based IaaS payment orchestration and optimization platform that simplifies building and managing payment ecosystems for merchants. The no-code rules engine allows businesses to get access to 100+ unique payment methods and anti-fraud providers worldwide through a single low-code integration, enabling them to scale their payments ecosystem and expand into new markets quickly, with just a few clicks. 

Merchants can personalize checkout experiences for every customer, create dynamic and smart rules for routing and retries, tokenize transactions, migrate data between providers and much more. Gr4vy is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, PSP-agnostic, and offers dedicated cloud instances for resilience, redundancy, and performance, eliminating the risk of a single point of failure.

To find out more about Gr4vy’s payment orchestration solution, check out our platform.

Regional payments can be complex. Breaking down regional payment barriers starts with meeting consumers’ preferred payment methods and needs regardless of where they live or travel. Right now, global retail e-commerce sales are on par to reach $8.1 trillion by 2026. Still, retailers must consider consumers’ payment preferences – which are as diverse as consumers themselves – to take advantage of this growth. 

So, how can retailers take the intricacy out of offering localized payment options, meet consumers’ payment needs and eliminate barriers along the way? There are three key steps retailers should consider. 

Target the local payment preferences of consumers

Payments have come a long way over the last few decades. Retailers have seen new payment methods like open banking, digital wallets, crypto and more permeate the market. Cash is no longer always king, and given higher interest rates on credit cards – with more hikes to come – global consumers’ payment preferences are diversifying from region to region. Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia have seen some of the fastest growth in digital payments.

For example, while cash still reigns supreme in Africa and continues to create the potential for digital payments due to demographic trends and high levels of internet penetration, Asia Pacific has the fastest cashless transaction volume and is on par to grow by 109% by 2025. More than two-thirds of US consumers expect to have a digital wallet within two years. Add to this, Open Banking has increased in the UK in part due to the region’s sophisticated technology stacks, and it’s easy to see consumers’ payment preferences drastically change depending on location. 

Knowledge is only power when retailers put data into action, however. A progressive payment mindset requires utilizing regional payment data to diversify and optimize the checkout process. If a consumer is in China, this may mean offering Alipay. Alternatively, if the buyer is in the US, the end payment option the consumer sees should be ApplePay or GooglePay. Regardless, knowing the statistical data means delivering on the promise of a customized and streamlined checkout experience. 

Diversify and optimize the online checkout experience

With nearly 1 out of 5 shoppers abandoning their cart due to a long or complicated checkout process, retailers must optimize their checkouts and offer all the payment methods consumers demand – otherwise, they are doomed to fail. While adding new payment methods can be laborious given that hundreds of payment methods, currencies and processors exist, it doesn’t have to be complicated – on the contrary.  

Retailers can orchestrate payments through a payment orchestration platform (POP) equipped with an orchestration layer. An orchestration layer optimizes payment processing at each stage of the payment flow for online transactions, minimizing the number of failed transactions due to technical issues. Orchestrating and adding payment methods also becomes easy, as retailers can forgo months of coding work needed to implement just one new payment type. POPs and orchestration layers also enable easy integration of all payment types, all in one place, without having to work with individual payment service providers or their proprietary APIs. 

As a result, retailers gain the ability to maximize payment conversion and add multiple payment providers while diversifying and optimizing the customer checkout experience. More importantly, retailers can deliver the payment options consumers demand, where and when they want them because payment optionality will no longer be an issue.

Use payment orchestration to overcome payment barriers

Payment orchestration platforms are a catalyst to offer regional payment methods, but more is needed to eliminate all challenges. The right type of POP must also be employed, which means taking advantage of cloud-native POPs.

The right cloud POP provides the technology needed to allow a retailer to test varying payment methods and route them to various endpoints based on transaction value and the regional location of a customer – improving the checkout experience at the back end. Even better, a cloud-based POP enables front-end payment orchestration where retailers can effectively filter and direct payment options offered at checkout based on a consumer’s shopping cart or previous transactions. 

A cloud-native POP also enables retailers to easily connect, test and deploy processors and alternative payment methods to ensure customers always have access to the regional payment methods they demand. Cloud-native POPs open a world of opportunities for retailers to personalize the consumer checkout, scrap their old payment strategies and make ‘sweet music’ out of regional payments to win at e-commerce success.  

If you’re a merchant looking to grow internationally and you’re interested in learning more about payment orchestration, download our eGuide, ‘IaaS vs. SaaS: An e-commerce merchant’s guide to payment orchestration’, to discover which platform is best for your needs – including building a payment orchestration layer in-house.

This article first appeared on Retail Touchpoints

Digital wallets are taking on new meaning as merchants grapple with how to stay relevant with consumers’ preferred ways to pay. With the total number of digital wallet users expected to exceed 5.2 billion globally by 2026, wallets benefit consumers and merchants alike, offering swift payments and convenience that expedite the payment process. 

But merely delivering digital-wallet payment options in a market dominated by various players is more complex than turning a payment method on at checkout. Costs and development, and integration hurdles create complexities. The key question for merchants: what is required for success without succumbing to payment challenges along the way? The answer starts with understanding the wallet environment, integration, and orchestration.

The Apple-to-Zelle of digital wallets

In a market with giants like ApplePay, GooglePay, PayPal, and more, merchants must contend with demographic preferences. For example, Gen Z shoppers, with less disposable income, prefer digital wallets, while Baby Boomers and Gen X consumers tend to use credit and debit cards. Regional preferences for digital-wallet usage must also factor in when targeting mobile-centric economies. China ranks highest in digital wallet usage, with 45% of adults using the payment method daily. By contrast, only 8% of adults use digital wallets daily in the UK; in the US it’s 6%.

Targeting the right customer is not the only consideration. Merchants must prepare for and adapt to new digital-wallet options and innovations as technologies advance. Take Zelle’s recent announcement of its intention to build a wallet called Paze to compete with the likes of PayPal and Venmo. And Coinbase just announced a wallet-as-a-service for businesses looking to offer Web3 wallets to their customers. 

More and more companies are developing digital wallets, and merchants that want to keep up with these offerings would be well-advised to plan now – or plan to fail. 

Navigating the complexities of digital wallet integration

While adding new digital-wallet services and options is necessary, many connect to backend systems through discrete application programming interfaces. Few of these are designed to work alongside one another while many can require months of negotiation work with individual payment service providers (PSPs). This lack of easy integration forces merchants to build backend infrastructure and frontend functionality to stitch payment methods together. 

Multiply the cost and resources required to add one payment type – given developers with the skill set and wherewithal to integrate and code these payments are in short supply – and it’s easy to appreciate the cost constraints and internal development challenges that can stress a merchant’s bottom line.  

Investing in talent and technology from the start sets up a pathway toward greater market success. So then,  for a merchant, the question becomes how to keep up with supporting digital-wallet payments and investing in their potential when nothing is ever guaranteed. 

Future-proof your payments strategy with a cloud-native payment orchestration platform

Executing the offering of digital wallets requires payment orchestration, along with the right tools and technology. Over the last decade, cloud technology has advanced to the point where cloud-native payment orchestration platforms (POPs) are the ‘digital gold dust’ that easily enables the addition and management of multiple payment methods. 

A payment orchestration platform is the foundation for all current and future payment types, making it easier for merchants to offer digital wallet options at checkout, enter regional markets, and scale for international e-commerce success. Merchants that leverage cloud-based POPs can plug in their systems, through one universal API, without code or complex negotiations with PSPs. 

As a result, adding advanced payment methods requires no code, and workflow automation becomes easy with minimal developmental resources and in just a few clicks.

The right orchestration platform allows merchants to experiment with new payment types and test specific payment methods. For instance, merchants can immediately add GooglePay to their checkout without the eight-month integration cycle associated with adding a new wallet. If GooglePay doesn’t perform to a merchant’s expectations, it can quickly be taken down, and a new digital wallet option can be spun up – guaranteeing flexibility and agility. Merchants can even create dynamic filters based on variables such as country, cart, and currency to target the right consumer with the right payment option. 

If you’re a merchant looking to grow internationally and you’re interested in learning more about payment orchestration, download our eGuide, ‘IaaS vs. SaaS: An e-commerce merchant’s guide to payment orchestration’, to discover which platform is best for your needs – including building a payment orchestration layer in-house.

This article first appeared on Digital Transaction

Across the world, rising inflation, market turbulence, and fears of a recession are leading to an increased focus from consumers on savings and reducing costs. Despite the global economic downturn, 2021 e-commerce sales amounted to almost $5 trillion USD, a figure retailers can expect to grow by 50% by 2025. As e-commerce continues to boom, retailers can adopt a new payment mindset and overcome key payment hurdles to take advantage of continued growth and overcome economic woes.

Retailers looking to upgrade their payment stacks will find the payments landscape riddled with complexities. Adding new payment methods is a complex process from integration to deployment, and then ongoing maintenance thereafter. International and domestic regulations and optimization of the consumer checkout process also present payment challenges that may seem insurmountable for merchants that are facing a number of hurdles in the industry.

However, the right payments strategy can give retailers a leg-up on the competition, and build brand loyalty amongst consumers.

Out with the old, in with the new – getting rid of legacy payment infrastructure

Legacy infrastructure is a term every business across every industry is familiar with as companies struggle to update and future-proof their systems. But most retailers haven’t touched their payment systems in over two years, making it difficult to keep up with consumer payment preferences and offering enough alternative payment methods (APMs) at the checkout, which, in turn, leads to increased cart abandonment.

The future of technology is in the cloud. According to McKinsey & Co., there is more than $1 trillion value in cloud adoption for Fortune 500 companies alone, and a 2022 Foundry report showed that 69% of companies had advanced cloud migration over the past 12 months, with merchants listing it as a top priority.

Payments infrastructure is no different. Retailers need a payments infrastructure that can plug in with their systems today and solve immediate pain points – for example, adding new connections, payment methods, workflow automation with minimal development resources. 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.

Cloud-native payment orchestration platforms (POPs) allow retailers to add a layer  to their infrastructure that can orchestrate, and standardize all the payment methods required by consumers. Through this orchestration layer, retailers can add both traditional payment types, and more of the new gen APMs such as Open Banking, BNPL, and digital wallets, among others. The ability to offer newer APMs will be key as interest rates continue to rise and consumers and merchants look to offset costs such as interchange fees associated with card payments.

When the merchant is ready, they need to depend on the payment orchestration layer to take over all their payment and risk processing needs as economies of scale makes sense and empower their teams to do more for their own business objectives. Retailers can’t repeat past mistakes with an orchestration platform that locks them into a single provider with a single point of failure. Payment service providers (PSPs) have highly scalable redundant platforms; bolting a single point of failure on top introduces unnecessary risk.

Optimize the checkout experience while meeting regulatory requirements

By working with payments in the cloud, merchants can gain a future-proofed and modern payment infrastructure that allows for easy optimization and personalization of the checkout experience. Payment orchestration platforms allow retailers to test new payment types and toggle on/off payment methods depending on transaction value, and the geographical location of their customers, among others.

In addition to the back-end orchestration outlined above, POPs can also orchestrate the front-end of the checkout experience. Merchants can dynamically filter and order payment methods offered to individual customers at the checkout based on the content of a shopping cart or preferences based on previous transactions.

For example, if a customer has expensive electronic products in their cart, they might be a good candidate for alternative payment methods such as ‘buy now, pay later’ or open banking, so a merchant can set a rule based on transaction value (for example, $1,000+) to offer a provider for that method, such as Klarna, Trustly or Vyne, as “first” in the order of payment methods displayed to the consumer.

In addition, the recent federal reserve debit card regulation will allow merchants in the US to benefit from increased conversion rates, lowering risk, and lower processing costs. Using orchestration allows merchants to take immediate advantage of cost based routing and optimize over time with intelligent data insights with zero costs and time to deliver to their organization.

With an orchestration layer or platform that optimizes both the front- and back-end, merchants can create a checkout experience that will delight their customers. Positioning semi-personalized payment methods depending on purchases in front of consumers, in addition to plenty of options for the consumer to select depending on their preferences, can be as easy as one click.

With greater payment options and the globalization of e-commerce, comes increased scrutiny on data protection and regulation. An infrastructure-first solution built natively in the cloud gives merchants the tools and features they need built into their own individualized cloud instances that they can quickly spin out as an ‘Edge’ to new locations, adding new and localized payment services through a single Universal API.

Retailers can’t do this with a central solution – they need a distributed solution that offers PCI compliance, and the ability to tokenize payment data. Edge computing provides flexibility for organizations to achieve greater data sovereignty, greater autonomy, better security, and solve latency issues. A cloud-native POP enables merchants to enter new markets by creating Edge Instances within a chosen country or region, keeping transactions and data secure within a local, unique Edge that is compliant with local sales and privacy regulations.

Give back to consumers through loyalty schemes

More and more brands are turning their focus to loyalty schemes as a way to incentivize and support consumers during difficult times. In the UK, retailers have been experimenting with pre-paid systems as a way to offset the impact of the ‘cost of living crisis’. Consumers make a monthly payment into a prepaid system with a specific brand and can take advantage of exclusive discounts.

Loyalty is becoming a part of payments. When coupled together, retailers have access to rich data around customer purchasing behavior, enabling merchants to offer hyper-personalized offers based on purchase history, and a consumer’s preferred payment method(s). For example, in the UK, supermarket chain, Tesco, spearheaded personalized discounts with its Clubcard scheme – where consumers receive points and offers against purchases they make regularly, or items they might be interested in based on transaction history.

Despite the gathering storm clouds, the outlook remains bright for online retailers. But to succeed against the competition, they need to give customers the personalized shopping and payment experiences they want, and payment orchestration platforms can be the helping hand they need.

If you’re a merchant looking to grow internationally and you’re interested in learning more about payment orchestration, download our eGuide, ‘IaaS vs. SaaS: An e-commerce merchant’s guide to payment orchestration’, to discover which platform is best for your needs – including building a payment orchestration layer in-house.

This article first appeared on Total Retail

Revenue for online learning platforms is projected to reach almost $60bn this year, with the number of users reaching almost one billion by 2027. Factors such as the increased offering of remote and hybrid working as a result of the pandemic, inflation, rising living costs, and continued globalization across multiple industries, has led to more and more individuals seeking new skills. From learning new languages – both linguistic and code, through to marketing, accounting, and sociology, e-learning has become the preferred way to learn given the added flexibility of setting a schedule that suits everyone.

Though online or e-learning has been established since the 1990s, stringent lockdown measures through 2020 and beyond has led to the “normalization” of remote learning across almost all age groups across the world. In global comparison, China is expected to see the most revenue generated, with figures projected to reach almost $42bn in 2023.

So, as e-learning continues to boom, how can businesses operating in the sector capitalize on increasing interest? Class is officially in session.

Lesson one: The challenges of growth – from payments to privacy

Scaling isn’t without its complexities. With more customers comes more demands and preferences to contend with – and this is even more complicated when dealing with multiple countries with multiple currencies. For consumers, flexibility is more important than ever, and consumers want to pay the way they prefer, with multiple options. For many, they are battling with rising inflation and impending recession, but are still keen to invest in their future.

E-learning and online learning platforms must be aware of consumer payment preferences across their customer base – whether they prefer to pay via a digital wallet, split their payments into instalments through ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL), cryptocurrency, or via online cash application, and money transfer, among others.

The challenge  is, onboarding, integrating, scaling, and managing any new payment method—let alone multiple. First, it can be laborious for a company to negotiate with multiple payment service providers and costly to accommodate their different APIs and functionalities. Often, months of painstaking integration work are required to add a single payment type to an existing payment stack and to related payment, fulfilment, and accounting systems. Then there’s the back-end work needed to support updates and enhancements to a payment type across its lifecycle.

On top of the challenges of deployment, there’s also geographic and demographic complexity to contend with. Online learning platforms require a deep knowledge of a market’s unique payment landscape plus technical and linguistic skills that many do not have. Once a market’s preferences have been covered, there also needs to be knowledge of generational preferences – is BNPL favoured by Baby Boomers or Gen Z? Do Millennials prefer debit cards or digital wallets? In order to capture the largest potential market share, companies need to have the financial and technical wherewithal to accommodate these different options.

Regulation presents still more complexity. 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.

Lesson two: What is payment orchestration? 

So, how can e-learning platforms cope with such varied challenges? One way is via payment orchestration. Online learning platforms need good and reliable payment solutions that can cater to an international customer base. They need to have localised and personalised checkout experiences, and that historically required heavy investment in technical resources to build, manage, and deploy.

However, payment orchestration – either through a payment orchestration platform (POP) or a payment orchestration layer (POL), is a way of alleviating the burden that comes with checkout optimization and payment optionality.

Current payment market models create long lead times, an inability to add or change payment stacks, add high costs and hinders retailers’ capacity to scale various payment options. Flexible payment infrastructure will be critical for retailers to remain agile, quickly roll out new payment methods and take on government payment and data regulations. The inability to be agile is a significant business cost and risk.

For merchants, a payment orchestration layer or platform helps to streamline this process. Through one integration, a merchant has access to multiple payment providers and acquirers, and is able to optimize the checkout experience on both the back-end and the front-end, while ensuring regulatory compliance and enhancing fraud protection.

For example, in the back-end, a merchant can quickly toggle between multiple payment service providers (PSPs) depending on location, payment method, or even commercial transactional volume deals. If one or more of the PSPs experience an outage, payment orchestration ensures failover so the merchant is automatically and seamlessly switched to a backup PSP, ensuring a transaction is never lost.

In addition to back-end orchestration which covers transaction routing to optimize for a variety of outcomes, including fraud prevention and authorization rates, among others, POPs can also orchestrate the front-end checkout experience. That is, everything a merchant’s customer sees throughout their experience with the checkout, offering a merchant the ability to dynamically filter and order payment methods offered to individual customers at the checkout based on the content of a shopping cart or preferences based on previous transactions.

Lesson three: What payment orchestration provider is best for online learning platforms

The payments landscape is riddled with complexities, and while payment orchestration platforms and layers have been developed to try and help combat this, selecting the right partner or method – should a merchant choose to build a layer in-house – can feel like more of a hindrance.

While merchants can build a payment orchestration layer in-house, it is a significant time and cost investment to achieve a minimum viable product. Download the free whitepaper, ‘Cracking open the payments orchestration layer’, and explore the use cases presented by consulting group, RPGC, which explores this option.

For merchants that don’t want to invest the money, time, and technical resources into building an orchestration layer in-house, there is an option to outsource to one of a number of payment orchestration platforms (POPs) on the market. However, merchants must consider their needs and whether that fits a platform built as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

SaaS platforms are widely available, and have a number of benefits depending on the size of the merchant. For start-ups and small businesses, SaaS platforms take the burden of managing and upgrading software completely off their hands – a major advantage for small teams with limited resources.

For large merchants who are scaling quickly and globally, and want control over their data and systems, IaaS platforms could be a better option. An infrastructure-first solution built natively in the cloud gives merchants the tools and features they need built into their own individualized cloud instances that they can quickly spin out as an ‘Edge’ to new locations, adding new and localized payment services through a single Universal API.

Edge computing provides flexibility for organizations to achieve greater data sovereignty, greater autonomy, better security, and solve latency issues. A cloud-native POP enables merchants to enter new markets by creating Edge Instances within a chosen country or region, keeping transactions and data secure within a local, unique Edge that is compliant with local sales and privacy regulations.

Unlike the shared tenancy SaaS platforms offer, an IaaS provider offers a single-tenant cloud infrastructure which reduces points of failure to ensure a merchant never loses a transaction. Merchants will not share infrastructure or server loads with other merchants meaning there is no risk of slowdown or interference from other merchants, as well as the ability to create bespoke deployments to improve regional storage. IaaS is not a ‘one deployment fits all’ solution – merchants have their own private payment infrastructure customized to meet their individual needs.

To read more about the differences between SaaS and IaaS offerings, and more about building a payment orchestration layer in-house, download Gr4vy’s eGuide exploring the options in-depth. 

POPs allow retailers to use payments as a strategic advantage. The platform a retailer chooses should optimize conversion rates at a cart level and at checkout, as well as advise and recommend how to increase sales and decrease costs as a retailer’s business grows and expands. Cloud-native POPs can replace legacy payment infrastructures and systems and streamline and manage payment methods, services and transactions in one place.

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 an overview of Gr4vy’s platform, watch this short video, or explore the platform features and get in touch with a member of our team to learn more.

This year’s Super Bowl has been reported as the third most-watched program of all time, representing one of the biggest audiences in the past six years with 113 million viewers, and the halftime show attracting an average of 119 million viewers, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. But perhaps the most interesting is that Super Bowl LVII was the most streamed Super Bowl in history with the 2023 game bringing in an average of 7 million people watching via internet-based services – an increase of 18% from the previous year.

These figures are unsurprising given the increased interest in sports across the world, and of course, the hotly anticipated halftime show, which drew in fans that may not have otherwise watched the game. But it is indicative of a much larger trend towards streaming. Nielsen, the data measurement firm, has been tracking the growth of streaming across multiple platforms and audiences, and reported that streaming captured 35% of total TV time in August 2022, capping six consecutive months of viewership highs, and for US sports specifically, Nielsen TV viewership data shows that the first three ‘Thursday Night Football’ (TNF) games on Amazon Prime Video in 2022 attracted significantly more viewers (13 million, 11 million and 11.7 million, respectively) than each of the seven Thursday games from last year that aired only on the NFL Network.

With 80% of sports fans, 76% of NFL fans, and 89% of football/soccer fans having regularly watched sports on any streaming or online channel last year, we can expect to see streaming continue to grow. So, how can streaming platforms capitalize on this growth?

It’s all in the way we pay…

It’s estimated that the live sports streaming segment itself will be worth $87.3m by 2028, but content doesn’t always result in conversion on the buy-side for consumers. Streaming platforms can show the biggest games in the world but will not see an impact on the bottom line if customers cannot pay for their services easily.

If platforms want to retain and attract customers, and grow into new and emerging markets, they must be aware of local payment preferences, and cater to them. For platforms that are trying to capture an audience in China, Alipay and WeChat Pay reign supreme; and in Brazil, locals might prefer Boleto Bancario. Perhaps there are consumers that find paying via cryptocurrency or QR code to be the most frictionless checkout experience.

For consumers, flexibility in payments is more important than ever, but for merchants, this can lead to a costly and time intensive payments strategy with engineers working around the clock to deploy and manage various payment methods.

Moreover, as streaming platforms expand and cater to new global audiences, they must be aware of local data and privacy regulations in each market, creating complications for those platforms without an orchestration layer to optimize payments and manage local compliance.

So, what’s the tactical play for streaming platforms that want to boost their bottom line?

How payment orchestration can help streaming platforms to capture a global audience

One solution for all the above is to use a cloud-native payment orchestration platform (POP), which facilitates payment routing and processing between multiple payment providers and unifies all transaction components under a single control layer, enabling the end-to-end management and automation of payments processing. A POP allows merchants to streamline and manage all their payment methods, services, and transactions in one place while dispensing with the time-consuming and costly coding and integration work involved in onboarding and supporting different payment methods.

A POP also helps to keep merchants in compliance with local regulations governing the use and storage of citizen data by processing and storing data at the Edge. A local edge keeps merchant and customer data in the region or country deployed, helping merchants meet data privacy protection laws while offering varying localized payment options to a specific region – making cross-border payment optionality easy.

Another advantage of a POP is that it allows merchants to work with various payment providers and thus avoid being locked into proprietary APIs or a single ecosystem. The result? More payment options at checkout, which helps optimize customer conversion and increase sales. And at a macro level, a POP acts as the foundation for all current and future cross-border payments, making it easier for merchants to enter new, regional markets and scale for international e-commerce success.

Case study: How ELEVEN Sports is using payment orchestration to aid international expansion

One streaming company that sees the value in POPs is ELEVEN, a rapidly growing broadcaster of live sports events. The 24/7 service generates tens of millions of views per month from users from over 200 countries and territories through a range of packages from free to periodic subscriptions.

ELEVEN Sports chose a cloud-native POP from Gr4vy to accommodate local customers’ preferred payment methods on its flagship ElevenSports.com platform. The company selected Gr4vy because of the platform’s advanced features and benefits, and its ability to provide quick access to multiple payment methods and providers such as PayPal with no additional coding required. By enlisting Gr4vy’s payment expertise and industry knowledge, ELEVEN Sports was able to test different payment methods in different markets in just a few clicks. The insights from these assessments have enabled ELEVEN Sports to achieve new user acquisition and global country coverage without hiring or reassigning software developers.

While accommodating different consumer payment preferences can significantly enhance the growth prospects for a streaming service provider, they also bring the burden of integration and long-term management. Ultimately, as interest continues to rise in streaming various sports in various leagues across the world, platforms will need to future-proof their payments strategy to grow commercially.

If you’re a merchant looking to grow internationally and you’re interested in learning more about payment orchestration, download our eGuide, ‘IaaS vs. SaaS: An e-commerce merchant’s guide to payment orchestration’, to discover which platform is best for your needs – including building a payment orchestration layer in-house.

In 2022 merchants saw an increased demand from consumers for advanced payment methods – all the while contending with ongoing and new regulations like SCA. The addition of broken supply chains, inflation and changing consumer behaviors also meant unprecedented challenges within retail, payments and fintech.

Flash forward to today, and merchants face a looming recession and ongoing shifts towards tokenization, cross-border payments and more, making payment orchestration platforms (POPs) that provide the necessary infrastructure to take on these hurdles critical to scale.

Across the world, merchants are switching their business models and taking advantage of new opportunities as they try to transition from ‘survive’ to ‘thrive’.

So, what trends can we expect to see across payments and retail for the year ahead?

1. Consumer shopping habits will shift with inflation in 2023

Inflation hits everywhere, which will be true for the year ahead. Retailers will feel a “squeeze” because continued high fuel costs and reduced oil capacity will make it more expensive to deliver goods. These high fuel costs will push retail sales down, making it crucial for retailers to incentivize consumers to shop and deliver savings back to the customer where they can.

Consumers will also look for better, lower prices on goods, pushing them to online shopping and shopping around in 2023. As a result, expect to see more of an open market. Consumers will not go to only one online store or marketplace to shop anymore; instead, they’ll start thinking, “Can I get this cheaper somewhere else?” To capitalize on this, retailers that sell goods will need to optimize their checkout experience to support consumers better.

2. Loyalty schemes will become big for retailers

Already prominent in the UK, loyalty is suddenly becoming a big thing for retailers worldwide as they look to loyalty schemes as a way for consumers to save money and increase brand devotion. Customers who utilize things like brand-specific discount cards in stores will get something cheaper than those who do not.

Secondly, retailers will start to offer additional savings schemes. If a consumer makes a monthly payment into a prepaid system, agrees to shop at the retailer, and then goes to that store and makes a purchase, they’ll get a discount for prepaying and showing brand loyalty.

Loyalty is becoming part of payments, and this will become an even more significant trend in 2023 as people begin to think about how to get through the hard times ahead due to growing costs and inflation. From a retailer perspective, it’s time all retailers start looking at how they can help consumers and turn loyalty into an advantage.

3. BOPIS (Buy Online Pick Up in Store) will continue as a popular retail strategy

Buy Online Pick Up in Store (BOPIS) was a big trend before COVID-19 due to security concerns as consumers had boxes stolen off their front steps. During COVID-19, with everyone home and able to collect packages, this trend tapered off.

In 2023, BOPIS will gain momentum again because rising fuel prices will increase delivery costs, driving retailers to offer discounts if customers pick up items in-store. As an offshoot to this, a little trend will happen where retailers even provide cheaper delivery costs for online items that customers agree to have delivered to a store nearby instead of to their homes.

4. Consumers will choose alternative payment methods over traditional cards

Most people are already starting to move away from traditional credit card payments. Announced interest rate hikes in late 2022 by the Federal Reserve and growing inflation and consumer debt will make alternative payment methods even more attractive to consumers in the year ahead. While there are many factors, if done right, expect real-time and instant payments to continue to gain prominence, and Buy Now Pay Later will not be going anywhere either.

5. Bank-to-bank payments and brand loyalty will accelerate in 2023

Bank-to-Bank payments are a cheaper payment method for the merchant, but no current incentive exists for the consumer to use it. Merchants pay a much lower percentage rate with customers who use this and other alternative payment methods as opposed to credit cards.

With Open Banking already big in the UK and growing in the US, merchants should ask how they can use this discount to benefit consumers, drive preference and deliver cost savings back to the consumer in order to incentivize them to use these cheaper methods.

6. Tokenization and data regulation will take center stage in the year ahead

Tokenization is big and will continue to be top of mind for merchants in 2023. With data security and regulations in place – and more on the way – many merchants are asking – and will continue to ask – how tokenization will change what they do.

As a result, expect to see the further rise of tokenization and merchants start to think about it and how they can use it to their advantage rather than as a mandate. As a solution, they’ll need to turn more towards payment orchestration platforms to help with tokenization and increase payment data security. If they don’t, then they’ll have to turn to a PSP and lock themselves into a long-term relationship.

7. Migration to cloud-native solutions will continue

Migration to the cloud is still happening and fast. A 2022 Foundry report showed that 69% of companies had advanced cloud migration over the past year. And merchants listed it as the number one thing they needed to do.

The cloud is changing everything everywhere regarding hosting. Big central infrastructures and large mainframe servers are no longer necessary to run things. As a result, payments are moving to the cloud, and merchants who don’t make this move will be left behind.

Merchants can’t lack the adoption of cloud-native payments infrastructure to serve customers’ payment needs. In 2023, they’ll need to look at the advantages of cloud computing and cloud-native POPs to achieve success.

8. Financial inclusion isn’t going away in 2023

Greater financial inclusion is always a concern for those within fintech and payments. Only some have a credit card, and with many Americans already at their credit limit, greater financial inclusion in the year ahead means merchants will need to evaluate their payment strategies and offer alternative payment methods.

People still have to eat and buy necessities. Merchants who only offer credit card payments exclude potential customers and reduce financial inclusion by limiting their customers to those with credit limits. As a solution, merchants should consider their cross-border payments strategy and offer alternative payment methods like real-time payments, debit card processing or other payment options. That way, customers who can’t afford to shop at a store due to their credit limit can continue to get the items they need.

Gr4vy’s award-winning platform is the only cloud native, serverless infrastructure (IaaS) with the resilience, redundancy and performance you expect from a cloud company. Gr4vy’s infrastructure gives merchants the ability to expand and control their payment stack from anywhere through a single Universal API. The platform’s single-tenant cloud infrastructure also reduces points of failure to ensure that a merchant never loses a transaction, and can also spin up an Edge to any instance and deploy it where needed, regardless of location, to help merchants meet regional data privacy and protection regulations.

For an overview of Gr4vy’s platform, watch this short video, or explore the platform features and get in touch with a member of our team to learn more.