6 Ways a Payment Gateway Manager Can Simplify Online Payment Acceptance for Merchants
The age of online payments
In the COVID-19 pandemic era marked with lockdowns and remote shopping, online payment acceptance has become crucial for businesses. All businesses are experiencing a surge in online payments—whether they are e-commerce providers offering online shopping, utility providers such as telecom operators facilitating online recharge and bill payment, or any merchant offering digital payment channels.
Managing online payments is complex and cumbersome for businesses, as they need to support multiple payment instruments and integrate with multiple payment providers—including banks, card networks, and digital wallet providers. To overcome these integration complexities, many businesses have integrated with payment service providers (PSPs) that aggregate various financial entities.
The PSP challenge
With the proliferation of payment channels, global expansion, and rising expectations for seamless checkout experiences, integrating with a single PSP is no longer sufficient. One PSP cannot meet all business requirements—from coverage across payment methods and geographies to ensuring uptime, low latency, and affordable processing rates. As a result, businesses are integrating with multiple PSPs to deliver an optimal online payment experience. However, this creates new operational complexities.
To solve this, the evolving payments technology ecosystem has introduced the concept of a payment gateway manager. A payment gateway manager sits above multiple PSPs, helping merchants simplify payment processing, reduce transaction failures, optimize costs, and improve checkout experiences.
How the payment gateway manager simplifies online payment acceptance
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Offers intelligent routing for better transaction control
The primary job of the payment gateway manager is intelligent transaction routing—connecting to the right PSP at the right time for each payment. Businesses can configure routing rules through an intuitive interface based on variables such as transaction value, time, payment instrument, card network, card issuer, currency, issuer country, payment channel, business unit, or PSP health.
Example: PSP-1 supports only card payments, while PSP-2 supports both card and digital wallet payments. The gateway manager routes all wallet payments to PSP-2.
Global example: PSP-1 has better success rates in the United States, while PSP-2 performs better in Singapore. Transactions are routed accordingly.
Payment gateway managers also help businesses honor volume commitments by routing transactions using percentage splits at the payment method or business unit level.
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Reduces transaction failure and abandonment
Transaction failure is one of the biggest concerns for online businesses, often leading to cart abandonment and lost revenue. The payment gateway manager helps by allowing businesses to define success thresholds for each PSP. It monitors PSP health in real-time and sends alerts when performance declines, prompting routing adjustments. It can also send alerts for underperforming payment instruments.
Businesses can define failover PSPs so transactions automatically reroute if the primary PSP experiences downtime. This prevents mass failures and improves success rates.
The gateway manager also enables intelligent retries—if a transaction fails due to downtime or timeouts, it is automatically retried through the next best PSP. This reduces abandonment and can increase success rates by more than 15%.
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Optimizes transaction costs
Each PSP charges different processing fees based on instrument type, card scheme, geography, and transaction characteristics. Traditional static routing often forces businesses into higher fees. The payment gateway manager routes transactions to the lowest-cost PSP, helping reduce processing expenses.
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Enhances consumer experience with smoother checkout
Consumers are often redirected to PSP-hosted pages with different interfaces, harming trust and user experience. Instead, the payment gateway manager supports embedded checkout forms on the merchant’s website for faster, more secure, and more consistent user journeys.
Additional features include card saving, OTP auto-fill, manual retry options, and personalized payment views such as showing commonly used payment methods first.
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Enables quick and error-free reconciliation
Businesses receiving settlement files from multiple PSPs across emails, APIs, FTPs, and portals often reconcile manually—time-consuming and error-prone. The payment gateway manager automatically fetches settlement files in various formats and provides a unified dashboard that highlights discrepancies, delayed payments, incorrect rates, and red-flag transactions.
It reconciles internal transaction records with PSP settlement files at a defined frequency and according to customizable rules, reducing manual effort and errors.
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Provides unified reporting and actionable intelligence
With multiple PSPs, businesses typically manage multiple dashboards. The payment gateway manager consolidates this into a single, unified reporting dashboard where they can analyze transactions, monitor success rates, issue refunds, and manage PSP configurations.
In conclusion
As online payments grow more complex, the payment gateway manager is a powerful tool to simplify operations, reduce failure rates, lower costs, and improve consumer checkout experiences. Numerous payment technology providers offer gateway manager solutions with varying capabilities; businesses should choose based on their operational needs and goals.
About the authors
Manu K Manohar and Mohit Bhargava
Manu K Manohar is a product manager for the payPLUS product at Comviva Technologies Limited, with nearly ten years of experience in payments and identity. Mohit Bhargava is a product marketing manager for digital financial solutions at Comviva Technologies Limited with 13 years of experience. Comviva is a leading B2B digital financial solutions provider with 135 deployments in more than 60 countries.
