There’s nothing more frustrating than integrating a payment solution (or several of them) only to find it doesn’t meet the needs of your platform or clients. Not all solutions are created equal, and choosing the wrong one can lead to significant headaches, technical debt and a poor experience for all parties involved, leading to lost customers and missed sales opportunities for your business.
Instead of settling for a mediocre partnership or cobbling multiple solutions together, it’s time your platform made the switch to a comprehensive, global payment solution. The right option will help you deliver an exceptional experience for your clients and their customers today, tomorrow and wherever business may take them. Think of it as future-proofing your business to enable growth.
Don’t Settle for a Subpar Payments Solution for Your Platform
Choosing the perfect payment solution can be challenging. You have to balance budget constraints and tight timelines with the features you need the most right now. As a result, you may consider a default option, like Stripe, or choose a payments partner based in your home country with the intent to figure out international payments down the line.
Unfortunately, what appears to be the most convenient or affordable choice often doesn’t live up to either expectation. And a subpar solution can affect multiple aspects of your success, particularly client satisfaction and global expansion opportunities. Here are some key reasons to steer clear of non-global providers and champion an integrated payments solution for your platform with global capabilities instead:
1. The path of least resistance creates more work in the long run.
It’s essential to find the balance between effort and reward and be realistic about your options. The easiest choice may meet your initial basic payment needs, but you’re likely to find product gaps as your platform matures. You’ll be forced to fill those gaps with additional tools, creating more work than if you choose a partner that can grow and flex with your business as needed.
2. Your payment solution doesn’t solve as much as you’d hoped.
If you’re a mature software platform, a non-global solution simply won’t meet all of your business needs. Each time you enter a new region, you’ll have to find a whole new payment partner to service it and then integrate all over again. This leaves you with more technical debt and the added responsibility of maintaining yet another integration in this ongoing cycle of disjointed growth.
3. Multiple payment integrations can lead to multiple roadblocks.
The more tools you attempt to integrate into your platform, the more you risk having non-compatible tools that ultimately break customer sites or slow down service. The best way to cover your bases is to find a single payments partner that can quickly implement new features and tools as needed, but also provide you with an affordable baseline product that’s easy to integrate.
4. Services offered are extremely limited.
Local language and currency options are the foundation of a positive online shopping experience. When you stack regional solutions on top of each other or stretch payment partners beyond their typical markets, your clients may end up presenting the wrong currency or language information to international customers, which causes friction during checkout. If your customers’ shoppers don’t see familiar payment options, they’ll likely abandon their purchase in favor of another vendor. Moreover, your customers could unnecessarily face high fees and low authorizations without a payment solution optimized for global eCommerce.
5. You can’t keep up with compliance regulations.
Though it’s behind the scenes, compliance plays an incredibly prominent role in payment processing. Every partner you work with needs to meet regulations everywhere you and your customers do business, whether it’s state-specific tax rules, post-Brexit laws or the UK’s GDPR; if they don’t, you’re liable.
If you’re layering various solutions on top of one another, you could run the risk of one or all payment processors coming up non-compliant in one of your key markets. This can lead to fines, restrictions and potentially even the loss of an entire customer market.
6. You risk missing out on future business opportunities.
While short-term challenges can be frustrating, the most significant impact of a regional integration comes later. A non-global solution doesn’t just contribute to your technical debt by putting your platform in a position to require additional integrations; it also limits how many markets and customers you can reach and, ultimately, stifles your business growth. If it takes a year to source a new partner to enter Canada, versus two months to enter Canada with a global provider, that’s 10 months of business lost.
Integrating a single regional solution or patching together multiple small processors just isn’t enough. Instead, you need a payment partner that helps you increase business and reach new target markets without setting up additional systems or making heavy investments each time you want to expand.
How Global and Non-Global Integrated Payments Solutions for Platforms Stack Up
Here’s an overview of how different solution types compare:
With the Right Global Payment Solution | With Non-Global Payment Solutions |
Maintain payment processing operations within a single integration. | Juggle multiple integrations that aren’t always compatible — and watch your maintenance costs and technical debt skyrocket. |
Invest once for a comprehensive solution that grows with your business needs. | Spend more money in the long run as you fill product gaps with additional tools and integrations. |
Onboard international clients easily with support from your payment provider. | Roll with the punches of each separate integration’s onboarding experience. |
Add immediate value with powerful features for all of your merchants. | Deliver limited features to select customers as integrations vary from place to place. |
Protect your transactions with a provider who understands global fraud prevention. | Deliver limited features to select customers as integrations vary from place to place. |
Benefit from higher authorization rates with a comprehensive optimized payments process. | Risk lower authorization rates for your merchants, costing customer satisfaction and revenue. |
Avoid extra fees by processing through local banks, all connected by a global banking network. | Pay high cross-border fees every time you process international payments. |
Create a cohesive UI and deliver the same experience to every customer. | Provide inconsistent customer experiences based on location or currency. |
Integrate with a global solution in 90 days or less. | Wait at least 3-6 months for new integrations to go to market. |
Discover the All-In-One Global Payment Partner for Platforms
Whether this is your first time integrating a payment service or you need to cut ties with a patchwork of partners, a comprehensive global payment solution is within reach.
BlueSnap’s All-in-One Payment Solution for Platforms helps you serve customers anywhere in the world instead of working in select regions. We leverage a global network of banks to facilitate transactions anywhere, anytime. BlueSnap also manages risk and global compliance so you and your customers can enjoy peace of mind. With BlueSnap, your customers will benefit from higher authorization rates and reduced fees.
Ready to make the switch to a global integrated payments solution? Schedule a conversation.
Related Resources: