How Eldorado took control of its payments to power global growth

Gaming is a multi billion-dollar industry, and players worldwide spend billions annually on digital assets to enhance their experiences. 

Eldorado, a leading online marketplace that connects gamers to buy and sell in-game currencies, accounts, items, and services, is a company at the center of this vibrant ecosystem.

The company’s mission is simple: make it fast, easy, and secure for players to find what they want, pay seamlessly, receive their order, and get back to the game.

“If a customer finds the item they want but can’t complete the payment, we lose them,” says Arminas Šimkus, Payments Product Owner at Eldorado. “That’s why payments are one of the most essential parts of our business.”

But delivering on its mission at a global scale isn’t easy.

Players in one region might prefer cards; in another, digital wallets or instant bank transfers dominate. On top of that, PSPs perform differently across regions and what delivers high authorization rates in one country might struggle to deliver in the next. 

“To address this challenge, we started to integrate new PSPs and payment methods,” says Arminas. “But it left us with a fragmented payment stack and little room to drive optimization.”

In other words, payments had become a bottleneck for Eldorado, limiting its ability to scale and grow the business.

“We needed to move faster, test continuously, and optimize across every region,” adds Arminas. “That’s why we chose to work with Primer.”

From fragmentation to freedom

Eldorado selected Primer after a competitive RFP process. While Primer wasn’t the cheapest option, it offered the best balance of capability and value. 

“It wasn’t a hard sell internally,” says Arminas. “Payments are so critical that we wanted the best provider, not the cheapest. And Primer’s solution, and the people behind it, made it the obvious choice.”

That choice has been validated time and again, he adds. “Primer has transformed how we operate and the speed at which we can move and unlock new markets.”

Arminas points to Brazil as an example, a country where around 42% of the population are gamers—that’s 105 million people—as an example. “We saw huge demand from Brazil, but it wasn’t converting because most players didn’t have access to cards or weren’t comfortable using them online,” he says.

To address this issue Eldorado decided to start offering PIX, which has recently become Brazil's most popular payment method.

“Without Primer, that would’ve been a three-month project and a huge distraction for our team,” says Arminas.

Instead, Eldorado launched Pix in just a week. Almost immediately, conversions and revenue from Brazil soared as players who couldn’t pay before could finally complete their purchases.

“It was a clear return on investment,” says Arminas. “Primer didn’t just speed up deployment; it turned what would’ve been months of lost opportunity into immediate revenue growth.” 

Turning payments into a perfromance engine

By removing the engineering overhead tied to payments, Arminas and the team at Eldorado can now focus on optimizing performance.

“We use Primer extensively for A/B testing,” says Arminas. “It lets us split traffic easily, monitor results through the dashboard, and find the best-performing routes for each market. That flexibility helps us maximize acceptance rates and reduce costs.” 

Those experiments run on Primer’s Workflows. “Workflows are one of my favorite parts of Primer,” says Arminas. “They give us complete control over how transactions are routed, and because it’s a visual workflow builder, it’s easy to make changes without calling on engineering resources.”

Fallbacks have become another key driver of performance. By automatically retrying failed transactions through alternative providers, Eldorado has been able to recover substantial revenue. 

“Fallbacks are a game changer,” says Arminas. “We’ve already recovered hundreds of thousands of transactions already and that number keeps increasing.”

3D Secure has become another area of experimentation. With Primer’s agnostic 3DS solution, Eldorado can test and adapt authentication flows by issuer and region directly within a workflow. 

“Some issuers prefer frictionless 3DS, while others don’t,” says Arminas. “Being able to adapt to that behavior improves our acceptance rates and gives us more control over the experience.”

Connecting the dots between payments and finance

The more Eldorado experiments, the more data it generates, and with Primer, that data becomes actionable. 

The team now has full visbility across the entire payment flow, giving them a clear view of how every transaction moves through the system, where revenue is captured, and where friction or costs appear.

Other teams, such as finance are also beginning to use Primer, extending the value of the platform deeper into the organization. 

“Our finance team recently started using Primer’s Reconciliation tools, which is a game changer,” says Arminas. “They can reconcile transactions in one place instead of doing manual work. They also use Primer to track which currencies go to which providers and monitor settlements. Having that visibility helps align finance and payments more closely.”

And when questions do come up, the Primer team is always on hand.

“The support from Primer is always on point,” says Arminas. “Account managers, engineers, product teams, everyone’s focused on helping the merchant. It feels like working with an extension of our own team.”

A partnership that delivers

Even though the partnership between Eldorado and Primer is in its infancy, the results delivered are measurable, helping Eldorado deliver on its mission and use payments as a lever to grow the business. 

“The support has been excellent, the payment method coverage is broad, and the workflows are incredibly powerful,” says Arminas. “Everything from setup to optimization has been smooth. Honestly, I don’t have any complaints, we’re very happy to be working with Primer.”

Get in touch to learn more about what Primer can do for you.