The gaming industry boomed throughout the pandemic as lockdowns sparked a new or growing interest in indoor hobbies. While growth can mean a healthier bottom line, it also means gaming merchants are facing a more complex network of customers – each with their own payment preferences and needs.
How gaming merchants manage and handle payments hasn’t changed much over the years. To meet the demands that come with growth, gaming merchants need flexible, scalable, and customizable payment infrastructure.
Payment orchestration is by no means a new concept, but, much like the rest of the technology sector, there is an accelerated drive towards digital transformation and the cloud. But why do merchants need payment orchestration?
It starts simply – merchants want to sell online, so they sign-up with a payment service provider (PSP) that processes credit/debit card payments, and the merchant’s in-house developer team integrates that into their company site. Now, if a merchant wants to add new payment methods, such as PayPal or Apple Pay, or it wants to expand into new regions where customers may prefer to pay with specific methods and providers (and a host of extra local regulation and compliance on top of that), the merchant is facing a real headache.
The gaming merchant’s current PSP doesn’t offer any of this so they have to find a new or additional PSP. All integrations then become the mandate of the merchant to add to the roadmap – meanwhile, the payments team is frustrated and the developers are having to invest a large amount of time sticking everything together. The result? Merchants end up with a compromise solution, full of workarounds, long lead times, and excessive maintenance and legacy hosting costs.
So how can payment orchestration help? And what should they be looking for in a platform?
The future of technology is in the cloud. Gaming merchants need a payment orchestration platform that works both today and wherever the future takes them. Partnering with an orchestration platform that locks merchants into a single provider with a single point-of-failure can be recipe for disaster down the line. PSPs have highly scalable redundant platforms; bolting a single point of failure on top introduces unnecessary risk. To take on digital transformation, gaming merchants need to choose a platform that works now, will work with their infrastructure in the future, and functions wherever and however it’s deployed.
With global growth and continued scrutiny on consumer protection, gaming merchants 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 merchants have deployed. When selecting a payment orchestration platform, gaming merchants must make sure it keeps them in local compliance, is cloud-based and can process data on the edge.
Like in-game characters, gaming merchants need to be nimble. The world of payments is getting more complex. Newer payment methods have arisen such as wallets, instalment 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 gaming merchants with free and chargeback-resistant payments.
A merchant’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 fulfilment teams. A cloud-based payment solution will unify reporting, irrespective of payment type.
Gaming merchants 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. Merchants must choose a platform that holds payment data and won’t lock them into a proprietary tokenization system, not allowing for data portability. They need to select a solution that maintains their payment providers, changes in reporting, and updates security protocols. Basically, gaming merchants need an “integrate once and don’t worry about it again” platform.
Payments experts are in short supply. Gaming merchants need a platform that offers support. Merchants are leaving business on the table by not supporting customers’ preferred ways to pay. The platform a merchant 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 merchant’s business grows and expands.
So why is now the time for payment orchestration? Gaming merchants needed it before, but now they can’t win without it, and must choose a solution that turns payments into a strategic advantage and enables digital transformation with ease.
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.
Designed with advanced capabilities and benefits, Gr4vy’s service agnostic and universal capabilities across PCI-level 1 payment credential vaulting, 3D Secure, tokenization, Apple Pay, Google Pay and more ensures that merchants always have the flexibility they need across their payments stack.
Unlike other POPs, Gr4vy makes it easy to move between service providers seamlessly with just a few clicks. And Gr4vy’s no-code infrastructure enables merchants to orchestrate payments and risk management services across multiple providers — making it easy to deploy, test and learn what services work best for their business and scale.
For more information, please visit gr4vy.com
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