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Should you have multiple payment gateways on your site? Voila, the answer to all your questions! Learn the meaning, pros and cons, and how to route transactions.
Not all payment gateways work efficiently in all geographies. Multiple payment gateways can ensure swift transaction processing and better checkout experiences for customers. But should you have them? What are their advantages and disadvantages?
Looking for answers to these questions? Well, here’s the most exhaustive guide on multiple payment gateways to help you out.
Multiple Payment Gateways: What Does It Mean?
But first, let’s get our basic concepts straight.
A payment gateway (PG) is a platform that allows merchants to accept and authorize payments. Payment gateways securely transfer money from the consumer bank account to the seller. Integrating a payment gateway is imminent to running an online store. The pandemic has accelerated the world’s switch to a cashless economy. In fact, reports1 state that the digital payments market size will value around $2,476.8 trillion in 2023 with an expected growth of 14.3% at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the forecast period.
Multiple payment gateways mean one merchant offering various payment gateways (at the same time or at different times) on their payment/checkout page.
Related Read: What Is Payment Gateway?
Some surveys show that multiple PGs can increase the trust of the customer. It also improves the chances of successful transactions. Now, both the PGs may be offering the same services in terms of payment modes, checkout experience etc.
Multiple PGs allow merchants to route transactions optimally. This results in successful transactions across multiple markets.
Multiple payment gateways can be integrated into a website in two ways:
- Integrating multiple payment gateways at once
- Integrating multiple payment gateways but routing them selectively
In the next few sections, we will discover the pros and cons of using multiple PGs at once.
How Multiple Payment Gateways Work (Step-by-Step Guide)
- Customer Initiates Payment
At checkout, the customer chooses a payment method (like card, UPI, wallet, etc.). - Routing Engine Kicks In
Your system (or a payment router like flowWise) decides which payment gateway to use based on rules like cost, success rate, or location. - Transaction Sent to Selected Gateway
The transaction is processed through the chosen payment gateway (e.g., Razorpay, Cashfree, Stripe). - Gateway Communicates with Issuer
The PG sends the payment request to the card issuer or bank for authentication and fund verification. - Payment Approved or Declined
If successful, the transaction goes through. If declined, a failover logic can route it to a backup PG instantly. - Confirmation & Settlement
The customer sees a success message, and funds are settled to your account as per the PG’s settlement cycle.
Multiple Payment Gateway Integration: How It Works
Integrating multiple payment gateways can seem daunting at first. However, it can significantly enhance your checkout experience, reduce payment failures, and future-proof your payment stack.
Whether you’re working on multiple payment gateway integration in PHP, Node.js, or any other backend framework, the core process remains similar. Here’s how you can approach it.
1. Choose the preferred integration model
There are 2 major approaches to multiple payment gateway integration:
- Direct Integration: You integrate each payment gateway individually using its own API. This requires custom logic for routing, failover, and reconciliation.
- Through a Payment Orchestrator or Router: Tools like flowWise sit between your platform and multiple gateways, offering one unified API with smart routing.
2. Set up Merchant Account
Next up, set up a merchant account with your payment gateway provider.
Ensure the payment methods you want to support (like UPI, credit/debit cards, wallets, EMI, BNPL) are enabled and obtain access to sandbox environments for testing.
3. Build Routing Logic
Now next up is the most important part.
You need to set up an intelligent payment routing system that works for you. You can create this logic taking into account the payment method, transaction amount, card type or issuing bank, geography or currency and gateway downtime status.
4. Integrate APIs and SDKs
Most payment gateways offer RESTful APIs and SDKs in common languages, including PHP, Python, Node.js, and Java.
For multiple payment gateway integration in PHP, this typically involves:
- Using cURL or a REST client like Guzzle
- Sending payment details to the selected gateway’s API
- Handling success or failure responses
- Logging transaction metadata such as gateway ID, status, and response codes
Keep your integration modular to allow future additions or removals of gateways with minimal code changes.
5. Secure Your Integration
Security is critical regardless of the programming language. Ensure you are using HTTPS for all API calls. Additionally, you have to tokenize card data through PCI-DSS compliant solutions and validate webhook calls with signature verification
Also try to implement retry and timeout mechanisms
6. Test Extensively Before Going Live
Test your payment gateway has its own sandbox environment and unique webhook response formats.
7. Monitor and Maintain
Post-integration, track performance metrics across gateways.Test your payment success and failure rates, downtime or API latency, settlement timelines and discrepancies and dispute and chargeback trends.
Advantages of Having Multiple Payment Gateways
Multiple Payment Gateways Improve Customer Trust
A customer might not feel safe to proceed with the transaction if they are unaware of the PG brands. In fact, an average of 69% of carts are abandoned2 if customers do not trust the site with their card info. Customers prefer PGs that they have used successfully in the past. Especially since they trust the PG with their confidential financial details. So, having more than one payment gateway can increase customer trust and conversion rates.
For Backup Purpose
Digital transactions may stumble upon technical failures. Payment gateways might fail to process the payment due to sales overload. In such cases, consumers can move to another seller to purchase that product. It is always better to have multiple payment gateways on the merchant website to avoid such scenarios.
Improves International Sales
Reports state that a lot of customers abandon their carts3 when they encounter a lack of preferred payment options on sites. The key to solving this issue is to enable multiple currency options on the checkout page.
With an e-commerce website, one can sell to anyone without location restrictions. However, differences in currencies pose an issue. A single payment gateway may not be enough to process payments from several countries. Merchants need to deploy multiple PGs on their platform to collect payments from international customers. Selling internationally improves the business and the seller’s geographical coverage. In fact, India was among the top 10 countries in 2020 in cross-border e-commerce growth4. It is expected to grow at a faster rate in future.
For instance, Cashfree Payments supports 30+ currencies. Customers can choose to pay in these currencies provided that the merchant has provided all the appropriate documents and gained approval from the banking partners.
Multiple Payment Gateways Meet All Customers Needs
Different payment gateways/PGs offer different features. It is hard to find all the features in one PG. Some gateways don’t accept a few brand cards, and some don’t offer monthly subscriptions. The conversion rate can decrease if customers don’t find the features they are looking for. In fact, 11% of carts are abandoned due to a lack of payment methods5. Multiple payment gateways offer payment flexibility to customers.
Multiple Payment Gateways Provide Multiple Analytical Data
Payment gateways (PGs) offer different kinds of data to the seller. The type of data that is offered by all PG companies is not the same. Each data has its purpose during data analysis. Based on this analytical data, merchants can make informed decisions to improve their business.
Disadvantages of Having Multiple Payment Gateways
Integration Issues and More Paperwork
Multiple PGs might mean multiple integrations and contracts. Integrating the step-up is not a hassle-free process. PG integration might demand a lot of time and resources. Since the merchant is installing multiple payment methods on their website, it involves a lot of paperwork. Moreover, merchants need to go through a lot of documentation processes.
Higher Costs Associated with Multiple Payment Gateways
Installing multiple PGs can cost more too. Moreover, tracking the processing fees of all the PGs may require additional resources. To avoid this scenario, some business owners adopt combined payment services.
No Volume Pricing Advantage
Gateway companies charge less to sellers if they process more sales through their PG. This is known as the volume pricing advantage. Let us assume that there is a seller who installed multiple payment gateways. Because of multiple PGs, payments are distributed amongst them, which reduces the chance of having a volume price advantage.
Complex Failover Logic
Multiple payment gateways or PGs need complex failover logic. For instance, let’s assume that payment gateway A failed. So what will happen next? Should the transactions be redirected to gateway B or C? This involves complex logic, and it is not good for conversion rates. One needs to be careful while deciding the best redirection method for failed transactions.
Multiple Payment Gateways Provide Complex Report Analysis
Different PGs offer different kinds of reports. Analysing all the data in those reports consumes a lot of time. To manage all those reports, the seller has to develop their reporting system to combine all of them.
Multiple Payment Gateways Bring Operational Challenges
Having multiple payment gateways on the website will cause numerous operational challenges. Let’s say someone had a failed transaction but the amount was deducted from their bank account. It might be harder to track which payment gateway the amount was deducted from. These challenges can be solvable, but they consume more time and need additional software products to point out the errors.
More IT Resources Required
If a merchant adopts multiple payment gateways, then they need to allocate more IT development resources to maintain them. These gateways involve complex multiple payment gateway integrations. In the case of high sales volume, there are chances of gateway failures. To solve such scenarios, more IT employees need to be employed to make the gateways run smoothly.
Features to Have in Multiple Payment Gateways
Able to Integrate With The Book-keeping Program
We have discussed the complexity of consolidating the reports generated by multiple payment gateways. While considering multiple PGs, a merchant must choose the ones that can integrate with the bookkeeping program to generate auto sales reports.
More Payment Modes
Offering multiple payment modes can improve sales. Payment habits vary among customers. Some want to use Internet banking and others may give preference to UPI or debit/credit cards. So, choose a PG that offers more payment modes. The most preferred payment method for global online shoppers is eWallets (36%), credit cards (23%) and debit cards (12%). In India, as of FY22, (Financial Year 2021-2022), the most preferred digital payment mode was UPI accounting for 52% of total digital transactions6.
Should Support International Payments
Buyers from different geographies may visit your eCommerce store. It is essential to choose a PG that supports international payments.
Should Offer Timely Support
It is important to choose a PG that offers good support service to its customers. Choosing the one with bad customer service can damage sales. In fact, reports state that 78% of consumers7 will do business with a company again even after a mishap if the customer service is outstanding.
Should Offer a Good Success Rate
Selecting a gateway with a low success rate can badly affect the conversion rates. So, always choose the one that offers a high success rate.
Related Read: What is the ‘Success Rate’ in Payments?
Should Offer PCI-DSS Compliant Security
PCI-DSS compliance systems securely allow customers to store their data in the gateway for recurring payments. Multiple surveys state that most customers need to trust the brand to buy from them. Customers are more likely to engage with a brand if they know that their financial data is safe.
Should Be Cost-Effective
No one wants to install a PG that costs a ton of money in the name of processing fees and transaction costs. So, choose a cost-effective one. But that doesn’t mean choosing a cheap and low-quality one. Moreover, there are substantial MDR differences for the same payment methods across different PA/PGs. So, carry out research and pick a PG that meets your needs the best.
Free Setup and Zero Maintenance Charges
A good payment gateway sets up the system for free and offers zero maintenance charges. A lot of Indian payment gateways (like Cashfree Payments) charges zero setup fee and maintenance charges from merchants.
Should Offer White-Label Wallet
Some payment gateways allow the user to perform transactions from a mobile wallet. Nowadays, most consumers use their mobile wallets to process almost all kinds of payments. So, choose the one that supports a white-label wallet.
Should Accept Recurring Payments
Choose a payment gateway that can accept recurring payments. Many consumers set recurring payments to subscribe to products of certain businesses. If they don’t find this option, they move to another seller.
Cashfree Subscriptions help in setting up and managing recurring payments for your customers. Using Cashfree Subscriptions, sellers can easily manage subscriptions for the customers and charge them automatically as per the plan.
Mobile Friendly
Nowadays, most payments are made using smartphones. In fact, mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) is now becoming a trend. According to Global Market Insights, mPOS will have an approximate CAGR of 19% between 2020 to 20268.
So, choose a payment gateway that is mobile-friendly.
With softPOS by Cashree Payments, you can turn any mobile into a POS machine!
Using Multiple Payment Gateways but Routing Selectively
The majority of cons of multiple payment gateways are solvable by routing them selectively. Transactions can be routed to the PG that performs best in that particular region. Moreover, some PGs are more suited to mobile payment than others. So, routing the PGs selectively to web users and mobile users can improve conversion rates.
Key Factors To Consider While Routing Transactions with multiple payment gateway
Some of the key factors to consider while routing transactions are as follows.
1. Downtime & Failover Capabilities
Even the most reliable payment gateway can face occasional server downtimes or integration hiccups. When that happens, your customer’s payment fails — and you risk losing both the transaction and their trust.
It’s always better to choose PGs with proven uptime SLAs and solid engineering infrastructure. But more importantly, implement failover routing logic so that if one PG is down, the transaction can be seamlessly redirected to another available one. This will ensure customer experience isn’t impacted
You can use monitoring tools to detect gateway-specific outages in real time and trigger automatic failover.
2. Geography & Currency Support
Not all payment gateways perform equally well across different regions. Some may have slower processing times or compliance issues in specific geographies. Others may lack multi-currency support, which leads to poor FX rates or cart abandonment.
So, consider using buyer location and preferred currency to inform your routing logic. This helps optimize for both latency and compliance. This localized routing reduces friction and improves success rates.
3. Card Network or Issuer Compatibility
Payment gateways have varying levels of integration and success rates with card networks like Visa, Mastercard, Amex or local issuers such as HDFC, SBI, ICICI, etc. A transaction might fail more often on one PG simply because of weak ties with a specific bank or card type.
Build your routing rules based on card brand, BIN ranges, or even issuing bank. This requires a bit more setup but can significantly reduce declines and false fraud flags.
Some routers like flowWise allow you to create rules across 40+ parameters, including card network-level routing.
4. Payment Method Availability
Customers today expect a wide array of payment methods — from e-wallets to BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) and EMI options. But not every payment gateway supports all these methods equally well.
Consider routing each transaction based on the customer’s selected payment method to the PG that offers the best compatibility and UX.
How To Route Transactions Efficiently?
Success-Based Routing
Machine learning algorithms can monitor and get trained for payment failures across the ecosystem. Thereafter, they can make fully automated routing decisions. All possible combinations of PG errors and payment methods that caused the failures can be taken into account. In fact, the algorithms can identify potential downtimes in near real-time.
But what if the downtimes are not global and specific to the merchant? Well, here the router can make routing decisions using merchant-level patterns. Moreover, the merchant can configure thresholds of failures at the merchant account level or payment method level. They can even choose to enable or disable payment methods to be a part of the routing algorithm.
For instance, flowWise by Cashfree Payments has a well trained AI routing algorithm that smartly routes transactions through the payment gateway optimising for success rates.
Rule-Based Routing
Every business can make some routing rules based on payment parameters like card brand, issuer, payment method etc. According to their needs, business owners can build their own routing rules. This routing method is static, where the business creates a route for each and every transaction. However, if the payment fails due to some reason, it would again lead to poor customer experience unless you have a fallback routing system in place.
For example, flowWise lets businesses create routing rules based on 40+ parameters along with smart routing capabilities. However, customers also have the option to use both smart dynamic routing and rule-based routing at the same time. If the transaction does not satisfy the rules specified by the business, then it gets routed dynamically through the gateway with the highest chances of success.
Can i set up single payment gateway for multiple merchant accounts?
Yes, you can use a single payment gateway for multiple merchant accounts.
Many payment gateways support multiple merchant accounts under one integration. This use case is popular for marketplaces, agencies, or multi-entity businesses.
This is done using features like sub-merchant onboarding, split payments, and dynamic routing of transactions to different merchant IDs (MIDs). Providers like Cashfree Payments support this setup with APIs that manage multiple merchants behind the scenes.
flowWise: A complete payments management solution
There is no doubt that multiple payment gateways are the future. However, the tech effort in integrating and managing them becomes a deterrent for scaling businesses. Here, solutions like flowWise come to the rescue. Let’s take a look at the different ways flowWise helps businesses manage their payments at scale.
1. Single dashboard for multi-PG management
flowWise lets you integrate multiple payment gateways for 10+ payment providers. Businesses can manage all their payments across different payment gateways at a single place. Existing customers of flowWise have reported up to 90% reduction in operational costs after using its intuitive dashboard.
2. Flexibility in payment modes
Online customers expect options to pay including UPI, credit cards, wallets, pay later options, etc. With flowWise, businesses can offer 200+ payment modes and provide a seamless payments experience to their customers. More payment options have also proved to be a factor in reducing cart abandonment rates.
3. Unified checkout experience
Irrespective of the payment gateway used, flowWise provides the end customers a unified checkout experience, which increases customer trust and gives a unified payment experience. From a branding perspective, this is a huge plus.
4. Efficient routing
With flowWise, you can route payments through the different payment gateways in two ways:
- AI-enabled smart routing: Here, payments are automatically routed through the payment gateway with the highest probability of success.
- Rule-based routing: Businesses can manually configure rules based on 40+ parameters to ensure maximum success rate with flowWise. It is also possible to use a combination of smart routing and rule-based routing for optimal results.
5. Settlements dashboard
Your business is receiving payments from multiple payment gateways. While this is great from a success rate point of view, it could easily become a nightmare for your settlements and reconciliation team. With flowWise, you get a single dashboard view to see all your settlements from all the integrated payment gateways at one place.
Related read: Payment Orchestration – why it’s important for Indian businesses
Conclusion: Should You Have Multiple Payment Gateways?
The short answer is yes. No customer wants their payment to get rejected and go through customer support to get their refund. Payment gateways are the most important component of the customer’s buying experience. The better the user experience, the higher the conversion rate will be. If the customer has a bad payment experience, the chances of cart abandonment and losing the customer increases.
Successful payments play an important role in improving customer trust and building your brand. Multiple payment gateways are one way to go about it, and you have the option of either using these PGs all at once or routing the transactions through them. Routing is the better option since it actively improves success rates and improves trust. Solutions like flowWise helps businesses to integrate and manage multiple payment gateways with zero tech effort.
