Ecommerce payment processing: What to look for in a provider

There are several indicators that your ecommerce payment provider is no longer fit for purpose. Here’s what to keep an eye out for:

Fees keep climbing and nobody can explain why

There are several factors that dictate 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's impossible to drill down to the root cause and identify areas for cost optimization (through local acquiring, smart routing, or a different payment mix).

Authorization rates lag, especially cross-border

A high rate of declines could suggest that something in the authorization chain isn’t working as it should be. This shows up most often in international transactions, where a provider without local acquiring relationships has less leverage with issuing banks and fewer tools (like network tokenization or address verification) to push approval rates up.

It's also worth checking how your current provider calculates authorization rates in the first place. Gross and net authorization rates can tell very different stories about the same transaction data. A provider reporting a strong headline number may be achieving it through retry volume, which is 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 turns into a complex troubleshooting exercise. It's easy for each vendor to assign blame elsewhere while your team loses time and revenue trying to get to the bottom of it.

For example, luxury lifestyle brand 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 be dictated by how long it takes your provider to add a local payment method. When every new market means a new integration project, growth slows, 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 get more accurate over time, not force a tradeoff between blocking bad actors and losing good customers. If your provider still relies heavily on static rules, or if genuine customers are getting caught by checks meant for fraudsters, the tool is working against your conversion rates. As your volumes grow, this becomes a high price to pay.

Reconciling channels still means manual work

If you process in-person payments and you’re still using a spreadsheet to match up online and in-store transactions, that's a sign you need a more unified solution. If that’s the case, you’re not alone. 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 to your revenue, since 53% of shoppers want to buy online and return in store. 

Once you know why your current setup is falling short, the next step is to identify what you need to shift the needle. Here are some questions to ask of a potential provider to ensure you make an informed decision: 

Does it give you global reach and local payment methods?

Local acquiring can reduce processing fees by as much as 59%. So, an important consideration is whether your provider can process domestically in your key markets instead of routing them cross-border. It's also worth finding out whether they have their own licenses 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, so this is an important conversion lever. Local payments can also contribute to cost savings, often up to 49% cheaper than cards.

And finally, it’s not enough to just support these methods. You also need to be clear how they support them. For example, can you access them via your existing integration? Or do you need to build out separate integrations for each one? 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 a large volume of transaction data catch 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, one that sits within the payment flow itself, has an advantage here: it can weigh issuer responses, authentication signals, and cross-channel behavior alongside the transaction data, aligning risk decisions with authorization and conversion goals rather than 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, which makes it hard to tune for seasonal peaks or high-risk scenarios. 

And if a provider offers a chargeback guarantee, check what that incentivizes. Providers financially liable for chargebacks tend toward more conservative thresholds, which means fewer chargebacks but also more declined orders and frustrated customers.

Does it support tokenization?

Tokenization reduces day-to-day 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 afterward, so it covers every transaction rather than the ones a separate tool happens to catch.

The same token that protects a payment can also speed up the next one, powering one-click checkout and smoother recurring payments without requiring customers to re-enter card details. Since tokenization sits at the center of pci-compliant payment processing for ecommerce, it's worth asking your provider what responsibility sits with them versus what stays with your business.

Does it connect to your in-store sales?

If you sell in person as well as online, you’ll do better with a unified platform that gives you one system of record across both channels. As well as simplifying reconciliation, it also gives you a single view of the shopper, enabling 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.

Here’s what you can expect if you partner with us for your ecommerce payment processing:

Reach new markets and keep costs down with local acquiring

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

Adyen removes that step with local licenses and connections across 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 optimization tools

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

Adyen Uplift closes that gap with machine learning trained on trillions of dollars in transaction data, optimizing 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 authorization, routing, and settlement, fraud prevention isn't optimized in isolation from conversion.

GetYourGuide felt this shift directly after moving away from 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 authorization rates and speed up repeat purchases

When tokenization is bolted on as a separate tool, it only covers the transactions that tool happens to see, leaving gaps elsewhere in the payment flow. That's a security risk and a missed opportunity, since tokens can also speed up future payments if they're integrated from the start.

Adyen builds tokenization into the same platform that handles authorization and routing, so every transaction is covered rather than just the ones a separate tool catches. Those tokens also power one-click checkout and recurring payments without customers re-entering card details. 

Strategic use of network tokens can yield a 6% higher authorization 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 can't reconcile transactions without manual work, and marketing can't personalize a journey it can't see in full.Adyen processes all channels on the same platform, creating one record of the shopper. For L'Occitane this resulted 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 fixing today's fees or authorization rates. It's about picking a partner capable of powering your growth rather than stifling it. The businesses getting the most out of their payments today, from Equinox to L'Occitane to GetYourGuide, made that switch for 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.