Ecommerce payment processing: What to look for in a provider

There are several signs that your ecommerce payment provider may no longer meet the needs of your business. Here are some of the key indicators:

Fees keep climbing and nobody can explain why

Several factors determine your final cost of ecommerce credit card processing. According to Adyen's Total Cost of Payments report, interchange and scheme fees typically make up 85%. However, if you're being charged a blended rate, it can be difficult to understand the underlying costs and identify opportunities for optimisation, whether through local acquiring, smart routing, or a different payment mix.

Authorisation rates lag, especially cross-border

A high rate of declines could indicate an issue somewhere in the authorisation chain. This is particularly common in international transactions, where a provider without local acquiring relationships has less leverage with issuing banks and fewer tools, such as network tokenisation or address verification, to help increase approval rates.

It's also worth understanding how your current provider calculates authorisation rates in the first place. Gross and net authorisation rates can tell very different stories about the same transaction data. A provider reporting a strong headline number may be achieving it through a high volume of retries, potentially eroding your margin. Learn more in our guide: Why your payment acceptance rate isn't the full story.

When something breaks, it’s impossible to pinpoint the failure point

When your gateway, processor, and acquirer come from three different providers, a payment failure can quickly become a complex troubleshooting exercise. Each vendor may point to another part of the payment chain, while your team loses time and revenue trying to find the cause.

For example, luxury lifestyle brand Equinox was managing three to four different providers across its systems, none of which talked to one another. "There was no interoperability between countries," said Eswar Veluri, EVP and Chief Technology Officer at Equinox. "We had stability issues where payments wouldn't work."

Adding a local payment method takes months

Expansion into a new market shouldn't depend on how long it takes your provider to add a local payment method. When every new market requires another integration project, expansion becomes slower and more resource-intensive. As Equinox found: "Whenever we wanted to add a new payment method, it was a massive project," Veluri said.

You’re forced to choose between low chargebacks or high conversions

A fraud tool should become more accurate over time, not force a trade-off between blocking bad actors and losing good customers. If your provider still relies heavily on static rules, or genuine customers are getting caught by fraud checks, the tool may be limiting your conversion rates. As transaction volumes grow, the impact becomes increasingly costly.

Reconciling channels still means manual work

If you process in-person payments and still rely on spreadsheets to reconcile online and in-store transactions, that's a sign you could benefit from a more unified solution. And this remains a common challenge. According to Adyen’s Retail Index, 31% of businesses still use a different payment platform for online and in-store transactions, and 42% don't make it easy for customers to move between channels. This gap has a knock-on effect on revenue, since 53% of shoppers want to buy online and return in store.

Once you know where your current setup is falling short, the next step is to work out what a new provider needs to deliver. Consider asking these questions when evaluating potential partners:

Does it give you global reach and local payment methods?

Local acquiring can reduce processing fees by as much as 59%. One important question is therefore whether a provider can process payments domestically in your key markets rather than routing transactions cross-border. It's also worth finding out whether they have their own licences or rely on local partners, which can fragment your data and increase your costs.

Another factor is the provider's coverage of local payment methods, since ecommerce credit card processing costs typically run higher than local payment methods. 49% of shoppers will abandon a purchase if their preferred payment method isn't available, making payment method choice an important conversion lever. Local payments can also contribute to cost savings, often up to 49% cheaper than cards.

Support alone isn't enough; how those payment methods are made available also matters. For example, can you access them via your existing integration? Or do you need to build a separate integration for each method? If launching Bizum in Spain or iDEAL in the Netherlands means a new engineering project every time, the provider isn't built for enterprise ecommerce payment processing at scale.

Does it bring fraud and conversion together?

Machine learning models trained on large volumes of transaction data can detect more fraud with fewer false positives than static rules, which require constant manual updates and struggle to keep pace as fraud tactics change.

An embedded fraud tool that sits directly within the payment flow has an advantage here: it can weigh issuer responses, authentication signals, and cross-channel behaviour alongside transaction data, aligning risk decisions with authorisation and conversion goals rather than looking at fraud rates in isolation.

It's also worth asking how much visibility you get into the model itself. Some fraud tools operate as black boxes, returning a simple accept or decline without explaining the reasoning, making them harder to adjust for seasonal peaks or high-risk scenarios.

And if a provider offers a chargeback guarantee, understand what behaviours that model may incentivise. Providers financially liable for chargebacks tend to use more conservative thresholds, which can mean fewer chargebacks but also more declined orders and frustrated customers.

Does it support tokenisation?

Tokenisation helps reduce everyday payment risk by replacing sensitive card data with a unique token. Even if a breach happens, there's nothing usable to steal. It should be built into the platform, not bolted on later, so it covers every transaction rather than only those seen by a separate tool.

The same token that protects a payment can also make future transactions faster, powering one-click checkout and smoother recurring payments without requiring customers to re-enter card details. Since tokenisation sits at the centre of PCI-compliant payment processing for ecommerce, it's worth asking your provider which responsibilities they handle and which remain with your business.

Does it connect to your in-store sales?

If you sell in person as well as online, a unified platform can give you a single system of record across both channels. As well as simplifying reconciliation, it provides a single view of the shopper, helping you create a consistent experience regardless of where someone starts or finishes their purchase.

Adyen is a global financial technology platform that combines a payment gateway, processor, and acquirer in one system. We work with enterprise businesses across retail, travel, and subscription commerce, including Burberry, GetYourGuide, and Spotify, helping them process online and in-person payments through a single integration.

If you choose Adyen for ecommerce payment processing, here are some of the capabilities you can expect:

Reach new markets and keep costs down with local acquiring

Expanding into a new country can involve new banking relationships, additional compliance requirements, and months of engineering work before a single local payment method goes live.

Adyen simplifies this with local licences and connections supporting 150+ currencies and 200+ payment methods, all through a single API. According to a Total Economic Impact™ study Adyen commissioned from Forrester, enterprise businesses reduced the operational full-time equivalents (FTE) needed to launch into new markets by 75% (worth $1.2 million over three years).

"Without Adyen, we would have had to hire more payment experts, and we would have had to spend far more resources on maintaining direct integrations to different banks and payment methods," said Natasha Belinska, Ecommerce Product Manager at Daniel Wellington.

lastminute.com saw similar results after switching to direct acquiring with Adyen. New payment methods like iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bizum in Spain, TWINT in Switzerland, and Scalapay in Italy were live within months, cutting payment method deployment time by 70% and implementation costs by 60%.

Boost conversion and block fraud with built-in optimisation tools

Most fraud tools force a trade-off: tighten the rules and block more bad actors, or loosen them and let more genuine customers through. Static, rules-based systems make this more challenging because they require constant manual updates and still lag behind changing fraud tactics.

Adyen Uplift addresses this with machine learning trained on trillions of dollars in transaction data, optimising your checkout for speed and conversion rather than fraud metrics alone. Manual risk rules drop by 86% on average, freeing up fraud teams for higher-value work. Because risk decisions sit alongside authorisation, routing, and settlement, fraud prevention isn't optimised separately from conversion.

GetYourGuide experienced this after replacing static rules. The platform saw 18 times better accuracy using machine learning, blocking six times fewer non-fraudulent transactions. "The result of moving to ML was a higher acceptance rate and lower chargeback levels," said Arjun Muralidharan, Group Product Manager at GetYourGuide.

Improve authorisation rates and speed up repeat purchases

When tokenisation is bolted on as a separate tool, it only covers the transactions that tool sees, which can leave gaps elsewhere in the payment flow. That's a security risk and a missed opportunity, since tokens can also help accelerate future payments if they're integrated from the start.

Adyen builds tokenisation into the same platform that handles authorisation and routing, so every transaction is covered rather than just the ones seen by a separate tool. Those tokens also support one-click checkout and recurring payments without customers having to re-enter card details.

Strategic use of network tokens can yield a 6% higher authorisation rate compared with standard card numbers, and the top 100 businesses on Adyen's platform gained $7.55 billion in incremental revenue over 12 months as a result.

"Network tokens are bringing us closer to seamless one-click checkouts," said Boris Griesinger, Head of Finance Operations at Hugo Boss.

Get a single view of customers across all channels

When online and in-store checkouts run on separate systems, finance teams may need to reconcile transactions manually, while marketing teams lack a complete view of the customer journey. Adyen processes all channels on the same platform, creating a single record of the shopper.

For L'Occitane, this created in better experiences for both internal teams and customers. Before consolidating, the brand ran more than 40 market-specific payment systems, which complicated reconciliation and left transactions prone to error. After moving to Adyen, L'Occitane cut reconciliation time by 20%. "With Adyen, we transformed payments from a point of friction into a true asset in the customer journey," said Hélène Goetzelmann, VP Client Experience at L'Occitane.

Choosing the best payment processing for ecommerce isn't just about addressing current fees or authorisation rates. It's about choosing a partner that can support your growth rather than hold it back. Businesses such as Equinox, L'Occitane, and GetYourGuide made that switch for many of the same reasons:

• Fewer vendors to manage

• Faster expansion into new markets

• More cost-saving opportunities 

• A single view of the customer across every channel

Ready to see what a unified platform could do for your business? Get in touch.