Why Smooth Payments and Payment Orchestration are the Key to Merchant Acquisition

For merchant aggregators, attracting merchants to your platform is essential for success. Platforms have built their business to appeal to specific merchant segments, but there is a universal driver of acquisition and satisfaction across sectors: smooth payments.

The J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Merchant Services Satisfaction Study reveals that technical issues have become a “plague” for retail merchants and customers, with just 47% of card-not-present transactions completed without some sort of additional assistance required.  

With almost half of all e-commerce transactions being completed without assistance, it is clear that payments can be a source of tremendous inconvenience and frustration for merchants. 

Despite this, the shift toward digital payments is only increasing — meaning merchants need even more sophisticated payment capabilities to handle the influx of diverse cashless payments. According to PwC’s Payments 2025 & Beyond report, the global cashless payment volume is predicted to increase by more than 80% from 2020 to 2025. 

Merchant aggregators are responsible for finding ways to smooth the payment process for their merchants to not only ensure their customers are satisfied, but that the merchants themselves see the true value of remaining loyal to their platform. 

Accomplishing this comes down to finding the right way to optimise payments for your merchants — and highlighting the payment capabilities to the merchants you hope to attract.

Why Payments Can Become a Major Pain Point for Merchants

Payments present a variety of challenges to merchants, especially if those merchants do not have the right technology partnerships in place to supply them with the resources and expertise needed to operate a modern, efficient payment system.

To name just a handful of the payment pain points merchants face, we have: 

• Adhering to various regulatory standards, but particularly PCI DSS compliance
• Difficulty expanding into new geographies and integrating the necessary payment services and alternative payment methods (as well as grappling with local regulation in new regions) 
• Onboarding new customers (especially those using alternative or local payment methods) 
• Minimizing financial risk by utilizing the right fraud prevention tools
• Implementing payment solutions, such as payment gateways, that make processing and authorizing payments possible

As a merchant aggregator, one of your primary selling points to merchants should be handling these payment headaches for your merchant clients — yet, you can only do so if you have the right pillars in place on your platform.

Creating Smoother Payments on Your Merchant Platform 

Improving payments for your merchants requires greater focus on your platform’s payment capabilities.  

Gone are the days when simply accepting credit and debit card payments was enough — today’s merchants need access to a wide range of payment methods and services to meet customer expectations. 

Let’s look at the necessary features a merchant aggregator’s platform needs to attract more merchants: 

• Payment Methods & Services: One of the biggest factors that the modern merchant looks for in a platform is a wide range of payment methods and payment services. This can include all types of alternative and local payment methods, as well as integrations for a variety of different payment services (such as their preferred payment gateway relationships). 
• Fraud Tools: The payment risk for merchants is increasing in complexity as the payments landscape continues to evolve to be more digital and diverse. To address these risks, merchants not only need access to powerful fraud prevention tools but also a simplified fraud prevention process that allows them to be relatively hands-off to focus more on customer needs. 
• Fully Managed Compliance: Going along with simplified fraud tools, most merchants do not want to have to deal with the complexities of compliance in-house. As such, having fully managed compliance features to offer to merchants can make your platform far more competitive and attractive to your ideal merchants.
• Global Connections: Digital and technological innovation are expanding merchants’ horizons like never before — and with that comes the need to connect to a broader payment ecosystem. Merchant aggregators need a solution in place for enabling merchants to easily connect to various financial institutions, payment service providers, and other B2B partners around the globe. 
• Payment Approval Success: Last but not least, we have payment approval speed. Merchants want to work with platforms that have optimized payment approvals as much as possible, allowing them to significantly reduce the number of transactions that either outright fail or require additional assistance before they can be completed.

Knowing which payment features impress merchants is great — but this is only the beginning of the story. 

To enable such features on your platform, you must either build a resilient payment ecosystem in-house or, alternatively, look for and integrate the right technology-based solutions for enhancing your payment stack.

Want to know more about what to look for in a payment solution for your platform? Check out our article on The 5 Key Capabilities for a Marketplace Payment Processing System.

Leveraging Payment Orchestration to Offer Enhanced Payment Capabilities

To establish a reliable payment ecosystem on your platform, payment orchestration is a powerful solution.  

Through payment orchestration, you can streamline your platform’s payment infrastructure into an easy-to-use interface for merchant clients that makes it simple to add new payment methods, services, and other key connections. 

Even better, you as the platform provider can alleviate the burden of compliance from not just your merchants, but from your own team’s responsibilities as well. Payment orchestration solutions are designed to handle all the most technical aspects of payments for you and your merchants. 

Here are three vital benefits of payment orchestration that help create smoother payments:

1. Accelerated Merchant Onboarding: By leveraging a payment orchestration solution — such as Spreedly — you can significantly accelerate the merchant onboarding process thanks to having access to a pre-established ecosystem of banking connections, payment integrations, and more. 
2. Easy-to-Access Payment Services: From the perspective of your merchants, payment orchestration enables them to integrate the specific payment services they need on demand. As a result, a key selling point of your platform becomes reducing merchants’ time to market. ‍
3. Minimal Development Effort: With the right payment orchestration solution, all the hefty and complex development requirements are handled for you — no extra developers or manpower required. Plus, this applies across the payment board, from integrations to compliance.

Boost Your Platform’s Merchant Attraction with Spreedly 

At Spreedly, our payment orchestration solution offers all of the above benefits and more, going above and beyond to provide merchant aggregator platforms with the payment support they need.  

By connecting to our payment orchestration API, your platform can not only boost merchant attraction but also simplify onboarding, minimize the risk of your payment infrastructure, and reduce the hassle of maintaining B2B relationships with payment service providers and financial institutions. 

Get in touch with Spreedly today to begin enhancing your platform’s payment ecosystem for merchants.

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