Your payment strategy is the unseen engine that powers everything from customer experience to profit margins. Yet, for too long, payments have been treated as an afterthought.
The real shift lies in how the most forward-looking teams now see payments: not just as a necessary function, but as a strategic lever for business growth.
But even if you have lots of great ideas about how to optimize your payment strategy, you might be bottlenecked by limited engineering resources. When even the simplest of changes requires a dev ticket, you’ll struggle with basic improvements, like:
- Routing payments to the most cost-effective providers
- Adding new payment processors and methods to maximize conversions
- Making necessary changes to your checkout to reduce cart abandonment
In this article, we’ll show you how adopting a more strategic approach to payments can help you maximize revenue and minimize costs as you scale.
Ready to reduce engineering bottlenecks, boost performance, and scale smarter? Book a call with Primer.
Step 1: Understand your business needs
It might sound obvious, but this is a step that many merchants rush or oversimplify. And yet, every smart payment decision downstream depends on getting this right.
Understanding your business model and how it relates to payments means looking beyond surface-level needs and taking a closer look at how payments impact cost, conversion, and operations, both in the short and long term.
Ask yourself the following questions:
What is your transaction value and volume?
Are you processing thousands of transactions each day, or just a few high-value ones? Your volume and value profile significantly impact nearly every layer of your payment systems.
- High-volume businesses need stability, speed, and automation. Minor issues, such as latency or failed retries, can become major revenue leaks at scale.
- High-value transactions demand more sophisticated fraud controls and may have tighter regulatory requirements. You may need selective 3DS, risk scoring, or manual review workflows to strike the right balance between security and conversion.
Choosing the wrong payment foundation early often means ripping things out and starting over just when you should be accelerating.
Where do you operate?
Where you operate and where you plan to expand should shape your provider choices from the start.
For example, let’s say you decide to scale your operations into the Netherlands, where 70% of online payments are made using iDeal. If your current payment solution doesn’t support iDeal, you then need to integrate with another one, which can take months.
If your current provider works well in your existing markets but doesn’t support your future roadmap, you’re setting yourself up for an operational headache later.
What sales channels do your customers use?
It goes without saying that a frictionless checkout is crucial for maximizing conversions. But it’s just as important to consider which channels your customers actually use. Are they transacting via mobile, desktop, native app, or a combination of these?
If your customers primarily use mobile, but your checkout is optimized only for desktop, you’re creating friction at the worst possible moment. Poor formatting, slow load times, and missing payment options on mobile devices directly impact drop-off rates.
Your checkout should feel native to the channel. That means:
- Prioritizing wallet options like Apple Pay or Google Pay on mobile
- Offering the APMs that your customers expect, including local payment methods (if relevant) and BNPL
- Simplifying guest checkout for smaller screens
- Pre-selecting the most relevant payment method based on device, location, or customer profile
Without that level of optimization, many customers will abandon the process before they even reach the “Pay” button. No amount of back-end optimization can recover a lost transaction that was never submitted.
(If you use a solution like Primer, you can seamlessly customize your checkout for both mobile and desktop. Learn more)
Are you a high fraud-risk business?
Your fraud strategy is a core part of your overall payments approach. While the details can get complex, you need a clear view of how your product affects your exposure.
If you sell high-value or easy-to-resell items, you’re more likely to face fraud attempts. That means your strategy may need additional verification, routing logic, or stricter risk rules. If you’re selling low-cost or niche products, you might want to reduce friction and keep the checkout experience fast.
Getting this wrong can hurt your business. Too much friction, and you lose legitimate customers. Too little, and you absorb unnecessary fraud and chargebacks.
At this stage, make sure you’re clear on:
- How risky your product and customer profile are
- What level of fraud you’re willing to accept
- Whether your setup needs flexibility to treat different transactions differently
Want to go deeper? Learn more: How to prevent online payment fraud: the complete guide
Step 2: Be picky about your payment providers
The payments industry gets bigger each year. And with so many providers to choose from, it’s easy to default to only using global providers like Stripe or Adyen if they’re present in all the regions where you operate.
But just because a global provider has coverage available in every region doesn’t mean it performs equally well across all of them. One provider might be a great fit if you’re operating in the U.S., but may not work as well in Europe or Asia.
Local processors, on the other hand, use local networks, understand local compliance requirements, and have years of experience working with dozens or hundreds of local banks. In specific markets, they may be able to offer higher authorization rates, lower latency, and a better user experience.
That said, not all local providers are created equal, and not all can handle high volumes or complex setups. It’s essential to evaluate each provider based on performance, scalability, and alignment with your technical and commercial needs.
3. Let data drive your decision-making
When you’re under pressure to scale or boost performance, it’s tempting to try to fix everything at once. However, without clear priorities, it’s challenging to determine what will actually make a difference. Let payment data be your guide.
Let’s look at an example. Imagine you notice the following trends:
- High soft decline or “do not honor” decline rates on 3D Secure (3DS) transactions
- High drop-off from the checkout flow during the 3DS step
- Lower authorization rates on 3DS transactions, especially in certain markets
If data consistently points to 3DS as your main source of friction, after you’ve already addressed routing and other fundamentals, it’s time to make 3DS your strategic priority. Start with a single, targeted test, like applying conditional 3DS rules where regulations allow, and then analyzing the impact on key metrics.
Focus on one goal at a time. Don’t try to fix 3DS, launch a new APM, and redesign your checkout all in one sprint. In payment optimization, precision delivers more value than multitasking.
Step 4. Understand that there will be tradeoffs
At different stages of growth, your payment strategy will need to support different business goals. A helpful question to ask regularly is: Are we optimizing for growth or efficiency?
These two priorities can pull in different directions, so reflect on what matters most to your business now.
If your current focus is on scaling quickly and acquiring new customers, try prioritizing a smooth, localized checkout experience. This might mean paying higher processing fees or absorbing more risk, but the reward is stronger customer acquisition.
If you’re at a more mature stage, you might shift focus toward margin improvement and cost control. You could look for lower-cost processors, route for cost savings, or limit support for expensive payment methods. At this growth stage, a slight dip in conversions can be worth the improvement in your unit economics.
There’s no one right answer — your goals will change and evolve over time, and your payment strategy should evolve with them. Use performance data to assess regularly and align your tactics with current goals.
Common mistakes to watch out for
1. Rushing to integrate every payment method at once
Some merchants get excited about entering new markets and push to add as many new payment methods as they can all at once. This might seem like a smart way to cover more ground, but it often leads to wasted effort.
Without data to guide your choices, you don’t know which methods are likely to improve conversions or performance. If you don’t use payment orchestration, your team could spend weeks or months building out integrations that don’t deliver the results you want.
It’s also harder and costlier to pivot if you’ve already invested in these new payment methods. A more effective approach is to add each payment method incrementally, analyze transaction data, and double down on what works.
2. Accepting long contract terms too early
Similarly, some merchants sign multi-year contracts with payment service providers, even though they haven’t had a chance to test their performance. It doesn’t help that providers often incentivize these longer contracts by offering merchants lower fees at sign-on.
Once you’re tied to a provider, you might realize they don’t offer all the payment methods you need, and they might even restrict you from getting them elsewhere. They also may start increasing or adding fees, even though they’re not adding the services you need to scale.
If the provider underperforms or doesn’t have the global reach or regional depth you need, you’re stuck. You’re locked into a costly provider until your contract ends, or subject to costly early termination fees. A better approach is to test providers in parallel, using short-term agreements and performance data to guide longer-term commitments.
3. Tunnel vision: optimizing one metric in isolation
Focusing on a single goal or KPI can be an effective path toward improvement. At the same time, staying focused shouldn’t mean losing sight of the bigger picture. You still need to take a step back regularly and monitor all key metrics continuously, in context.
For example, imagine a global apparel brand experiments with its 3DS rules, and manages to increase authorization rates by 2%. For a business generating billions in annual revenue, this means a lift of millions per year.
But what happens when stakeholders only notice the secondary outcome: a dip in overall conversion rates? Without a clear understanding of your payment team’s priorities, the drop-off at checkout may overshadow the broader business gain.
A similar tradeoff emerges with fraud tooling. While stricter controls may reduce chargebacks, they can also trigger false declines and reduce conversion rates. When focus shifts too much toward reducing risk, brands can unintentionally end up losing more in missed sales. And without true alignment on what success means, performance wins in one area can look like losses in another.
4. Underestimating the impact of checkout UX
Many merchants obsess over backend performance but ignore the checkout page itself, where most drop-off occurs.
Slow load times, cluttered interfaces, and irrelevant payment options can frustrate customers and kill conversions.
It needs to be easy for customers to find their preferred payment methods and complete the checkout form in no more than a few steps. But without the tools to easily test changes, even minor improvements to the checkout experience can take weeks.
A critical component of an effective payment strategy, then, is investing in tools, like a checkout builder, that enable more efficient experimentation, testing, and implementation at checkout.
5. Treating payments as fixed (rather than fluid)
Payment strategy isn’t something you build once and forget. Whatever you create needs to keep evolving. Customer behavior is always changing and provider performance fluctuates, so you have to be able to adjust your strategy on the fly.
Payment methods tend to rise and fall quickly, some further and faster than others.
For example, Blik, which is only about ten years old, now has about 50% online market share in Poland. And in Brazil, PIX saw 53% YoY growth from 2023 to 2024.
If you can’t adapt quickly, by adding, testing, switching, or routing, you’ll fall behind faster-moving competitors. You need a strategy and the right set of tools to keep updating your plans as you go.
6. Overengineering without orchestration
Building an in-house solution is difficult. You need a lot of engineering resources to hardcode routing logic, integrate every provider, and manually manage each and every change. That makes experimentation slow and scaling painful, the opposite of an agile payment strategy.
A better solution is payment orchestration, which lets you manage and optimize all of your payment functions through a single, centralized payment platform. Instead of building manual connections to multiple payment providers, orchestration lets you control them all from one dashboard.
Payment orchestration platforms enable you to execute your payment strategy without waiting around for engineering resources. You can integrate with new payment methods, set up payment routing, run A/B tests, and manage your checkout all yourself, without any code.
Want to skip the costly mistakes? Talk to our team about building a payment stack that scales.
How to use Primer to execute your payment strategy
In the past, payment teams often worked with one hand tied behind their back. They could see where approval rates were slipping, or where new payment methods might unlock growth, but they couldn’t implement the fixes themselves. Everything had to run through engineering: Progress moved at the pace of development cycles, not the pace of opportunity.
Primer changes that dynamic. By unifying the entire payment stack into a single infrastructure, it gives payment teams direct control to design, test, and optimise their own strategies. Leading brands like Printify, New Look, Voi, and Banxa use Primer to cut through complexity, reduce engineering overhead, and turn payments into a genuine driver of growth.
Primer is the world’s first unified payment infrastructure, built to give merchants complete control over their payment stack. From Printify and New Look to Voi and Banxa, leading brands rely on Primer to simplify complexity, accelerate growth, and turn payments into a competitive advantage.
Add payment methods quickly, without code
Adding payment methods manually requires internal reviews, engineering estimates, and long onboarding processes. With Primer, you skip the technical lift entirely. Any team member can add, configure, or update global, local, and alternative payment types.
Voi, a fast-growing European e-scooter company, uses Primer to quickly add payment methods across new cities. "We're seeing really good results for all the new payment methods that we're adding," says Caroline Hjelm, VP of Growth. "It's helping us convert more users into active riders."
Read the full case study: How Voi use payments to win more city licenses, activate more users & drive higher usage.
Set up payment routing without engineering resources
Primer Workflows makes it easy to set up payment routing with drag-and-drop features. Route payments to relevant processors, add conditional 3DS and fraud prevention, and trigger automations using third-party services.
Ferryhopper uses Primer to route payments with intelligent conditioning logic across 12+ countries. "Crafting these workflows has proven to be remarkably straightforward," says Konstantinos Kontos, Product Owner-Payments.
Read the case study: Charting a new course for payments at Ferryhopper
Recover revenue with Primer Fallbacks
Soft declines cost merchants millions, but setting up cascading payments typically requires complex engineering. Primer Fallbacks can be set up in just a few clicks, automatically routing failed payments to backup processors.
Banxa, a global crypto leader, recovered over US$7 million in the first half of 2024 using Fallbacks alone. "Enabling Fallbacks was seamless, requiring just a few clicks," says Head of Payments Greg Rikkhachai.
Full case study: Banxa breaks down barriers to crypto adoption
Optimize your checkout experience
Primer's Universal Checkout puts you in control. Decide which payment methods to show, their order, and presentation. Customize design, run experiments, and optimize conversion—all without code.
Pelago uses Universal Checkout across 150+ countries to tailor payment options by region. "We can strategically position PayNow at checkout to encourage its use among travelers, optimizing both conversion rates and cost efficiency," says CPO Altaf Dhamani.
Case study: Pelago creates new horizons for travel and payments with Primer
Real-time insights with Observability
Primer Observability centralizes your entire payments ecosystem, aggregating data from all providers into one interface. Filter by payment method, region, processor, or individual transaction for clear performance insights.
And with Primer Monitors, you don’t have to wait for daily reports or rely on manual checks to spot issues. Monitors send real-time alerts via webhooks, email, or Slack, detecting performance changes based on the exact metrics you care about, such as approval rates, processor downtime, or sudden spikes in chargebacks.
Take control of your payment strategy with Primer
Merchants face mounting complexity using payments as a growth engine. Primer brings speed and strategy into alignment, letting you quickly execute ideas without manual routing, tedious integrations, or fragmented data.
Book a call to find out how we can help you grow faster and smarter.
FAQ: Building a payment strategy in 2025
What is a payment strategy?
A payment strategy is the way a business manages providers, methods, fraud, and checkout to maximize revenue and reduce costs. Primer helps merchants execute smarter strategies by unifying everything into one infrastructure.
Why should businesses treat payments as strategic?
Payments impact approval rates, checkout conversion, and operating margins. Treating them as a growth lever rather than “plumbing” helps businesses scale faster. Primer enables this shift by giving teams direct control over their stack.
How do limited engineering resources affect payments?
When every change requires developer time, businesses struggle to add methods, optimize routing, or update checkout. Primer removes these bottlenecks with no-code workflows and a single API integration.
What makes a modern payment strategy effective?
An effective strategy includes resilience, localized payment methods, seamless checkout, operational agility, and real-time analytics. Primer delivers all five in one platform.
How can companies optimize their payment stack with Primer?
With Primer, merchants can add new payment methods without code, route payments intelligently, recover failed transactions with Fallbacks, and optimize checkout and reporting in one unified system
