Multi-acquiring in eCommerce Payments

Acceptance of eCommerce payments 

When you are thinking of starting acceptance of eCommerce payments via cards or other payment methods, you should definitely consider a long term strategy and a multi-acquiring scenario.

The starting point for any merchant, marketplace or other digital platform is the way you are going to charge users on the Internet. Normally, you are thinking of choosing an acquirer like Stripe, Adyen or local providers from your country. Let’s think of strategic implications.

Strategic implications

Assuming you have one acquiring partner at a time and you customize your platform to their requirement you are actually building a very strong dependency on this partner. Very often you will ask this acquirer to provide Card-on-File functionalities, cards of your users will be stored by this acquiring partner. Sometimes the acquirer will have features that support easier transaction conversion but they will be hosted on the partner side to avoid PCI DSS requirements and costs. By implementing such functionalities that will be good for your users and UX, you are actually becoming more and more dependent on your acquiring partner. It means that your negotiating power is going down and the cost of transaction processing will grow.

The bigger your business is, the bigger the problem is. What is the solution to such a situation?

Multi-acquiring

It is called multi-acquiring. You should choose a technology platform, compliant with PCI DSS requirements that can integrate with multiple acquirers globally so that you are not dependent on a single acquirer but have a technical platform which enables switching transactions from one acquirer to another one.

Such a platform should enable tokenization of cards and transactions, should take all PCI DSS problems from your shoulders, and should be integrated with multiple acquirers from the moment of start. Thanks to it, you can switch VISA transactions through one acquirer, Mastercard through another one. You can use one acquirer on Mondays and another one on Fridays. You can switch transactions done in Europe with one acquirer and performed by users from America with another acquirer.

It gives you flexibility. It improves conversion rates. It gives you the opportunity to negotiate transaction fees regularly. It does not increase costs on your side as you have multiple partners integrated to the platform which means that you do not need to cover all costs of integration yourself.

Multi-acquiring is a very powerful tool for developing your eCommerce business.

Thanks for reading.