If your business is scaling fast, you've probably felt the friction in your payment stack.
Maybe your approval rates are dipping in new markets. Or your team is stuck juggling multiple PSP dashboards, trying to understand why conversions are flat.
Maybe engineering is bogged down in integrating yet another payment method, while finance is buried in reconciliation spreadsheets.
Your payment stack shouldn’t be holding you back. It should be helping you move faster, convert more customers, and expand your operations with confidence.
In this guide, we’ll break down what a high-performing payment stack looks like, and how teams use unified infrastructure like Primer to transform payments from a bottleneck to a growth center.
Looking for a tool to help you manage your payment stack without relying on engineering resources? Book a demo with our experts to learn how Primer can help your business.
Why your payment stack is so important
Businesses often overlook payments. It’s treated like plumbing in a house: it’s invisible…until something goes wrong.
However, just because you accept payments, it doesn’t mean your setup is helping you convert, scale, or operate efficiently.
To stay competitive, you need to be proactive. You can’t wait for something to go wrong before you take action.
How your payment stack is configured can affect:
- Conversion rates: Latency, unnecessary 3DS challenge, or a clunky checkout experience can cause customers to abandon their cart.
- Market expansion: Without the right payment methods, or a PSP that performs well in the region, your market entry strategy may fall flat. Even if you have demand, poor payment coverage or low approval rates can undermine performance and prevent growth.
- Operational efficiency: Your payment stack is inefficient if you need engineering support every time you want to test a new provider or routing logic. Agile payment teams move fast without having to write code.
Payments aren’t a static function. High-performing businesses don’t just fix problems when they arise; they proactively experiment and adapt to optimize their payment strategy.
What makes up a modern payment stack?
A modern payment stack brings together multiple components, each responsible for a different stage in the payment journey.
These typically include:
- Payment service providers (PSPs): For processing transactions and handling acquiring
- Payment gateways: To securely transmit transaction data.
- Fraud tools and authentication systems: To detect suspicious activity and manage risk
- Token vaults: To store customer credentials safely and enable reuse (often stored through a PSP)
- Checkout integrations: To display the right payment methods to each user
- Reporting and analytics tools: To track performance across markets and providers
These tools enable businesses to accept, manage, and optimize payments globally. But as your business grows, managing these components becomes more complex and more fragmented.
Why payment orchestration is so important
In the past, each part of the payment stack had to be integrated and managed separately, often across multiple systems, teams, and workflows. That meant slower experimentation, higher engineering overhead, and limited visibility.
Payment orchestration eliminates these challenges.
The orchestration layer sits above your stack and connects everything: PSPs, fraud tools, vaults, checkout flows, and more. It acts as the control center for your payments, so you can manage logic, automate workflows, and optimize performance from one place.
Read more: What is payment orchestration, and how does it work?
Five traits of a high-performing payment stack
The best payment stacks are more than just a collection of tools. They’re designed for flexibility, built to recover quickly, and should give teams the control to move fast.
High-performing stacks are optimized to drive better results: more approvals, fewer drop-offs, faster issue resolution, and greater visibility. They’re built for speed, adaptability, and impact, helping businesses move faster and grow with confidence.
Here are six traits of a high-performing payment stack:
1. Resilience by design: uses a multi-processor strategy
The best stacks are built for redundancy from day one. They don’t rely on a single PSP or acquirer. Instead, they route transactions dynamically across multiple providers based on geography, card type, or real-time performance.
If a provider goes down or approval rates dip in a key market, traffic can be rerouted automatically with no code changes and no panic. Teams can also retry soft declined (recoverable) payments with another processor, reducing drop-offs and quietly recovering revenue in the background.
Business impact: Higher authorization rates and lower revenue loss from failed payments.
2. Localized and customer-centric payment methods
In 2025, offering the ability to pay by debit or credit card is the bare minimum in most markets. An effective payment stack will offer a variety of ways to pay, including:
- Digital wallets, like Apple Pay and Google Pay
- Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options like Klarna and Afterpay
- Local payment options, like iDEAL in the Netherlands, PayNow in Singapore, or Alipay in China
Failing to offer the payment methods your customers expect can result in customers abandoning their carts and potentially moving to a competitor.
However, it’s not just about offering more methods; it’s about dynamically tailoring the checkout experience for each customer. A modern payment stack should enable you to surface the right payment methods based on who the customer is, where they’re located, and what device they’re using. With a codeless orchestration layer, you can quickly add and configure new options from the dashboard, without needing engineering support.
Business impact: Meeting local expectations delivers higher conversion rates and stronger market competitiveness
3. Seamless and consistent checkout
For a seamless checkout experience, wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay should appear when contextually relevant. 3DS should only trigger when required by regulation or needed based on your risk appetite. And customers should never bounce between screens, be asked to re-enter details, or be left wondering if their payment was successful.
A high-performing stack delivers a checkout that:
- Loads quickly and is optimized for all devices
- Has a frictionless user experience that clearly communicates what the customer needs to do
- Offers a guest checkout option
Business impact: Reduced cart abandonment and improved checkout completion rates.
4. Operational agility without engineering bottlenecks
Most payment decisions shouldn’t need a developer. Yet in many businesses, making nearly any change to your payments involves raising a ticket and waiting for a sprint.
Top-performing teams work differently. They can update routing logic, enable fallback flows, tweak authentication rules, or test providers directly from a dashboard, with little to no code required.
With the proper tooling, payment teams can experiment, fix issues, and roll out changes quickly, without relying on engineering every time.
Business impact: It frees up engineers to focus on the core product and empowers payment teams to quickly test new strategies to improve performance.
5. Real-time visibility and continuous optimization
You can’t optimize what you can’t see. And if you're still switching between dashboards or downloading CSVs just to understand what’s going wrong, you will fall behind.
High-performing stacks include a unified analytics tool that enables payment teams to monitor real-time authorization rates, decline reasons, fraud spikes, and provider performance. They know immediately when something breaks (or improves) and can act accordingly.
This visibility turns payments into a performance driver, not a black box. It helps businesses move from reactive fixes to proactive improvements.
Business impact: Proactively resolves issues before they impact revenue, customer trust, or your brand reputation.
How to build an effective, modernized payment stack
Understanding what goes into a high-performing payment stack is one thing. Bringing it to life, without long development cycles or fragile workarounds, is another.
That’s where Primer comes in.
Primer is a unified payments infrastructure that enables you to build, manage, and optimize your entire payments ecosystem through a single API integration. It provides an end-to-end orchestration layer across all your services so you can execute quickly, iterate safely, and operate with complete visibility.
With Primer, you can:
- Connect to PSPs and payment methods without code. Adding a new acquirer or local wallet shouldn’t mean weeks of engineering work. Primer gives you pre-built connections to over 100 providers globally. You can activate and configure new PSPs and payment methods directly from the dashboard, in just a few clicks.
- Enable Fallbacks to recover failed transactions. When a transaction fails due to a provider outage or a soft decline, Fallbacks reroute the payment in real time, without disrupting the customer experience.
- Route payments intelligently. Multiple providers are only helpful if you can control how you route between them. With Primer, you can route transactions based on geography, card scheme, issuer BIN, transaction value, or performance; whatever logic makes the most sense for your business. You’re no longer limited to static configurations or one-size-fits-all rules.
- Optimize your front-end experience without needing to code. Primer’s Universal Checkout ensures customers see a fast, familiar, and localized experience regardless of device, market, or method. You can surface the right options automatically (such as Apple Pay on iPhones or iDEAL in the Netherlands) and update your front-end directly from the dashboard in seconds.
- Track performance in real time with Observability. Primer offers a unified, real-time view of your entire payment stack across all your services. You can track authorization rates, decline reasons, and routing performance, all in one place.
This enables your team to effectively A/B test your payment strategy. For instance, you might decide to compare the conversion rate of global payment methods (like traditional card payments) vs. more localized options (like iDeal in the Netherlands).
With Monitors, Primer alerts your team when anything falls outside your set threshold, so you can act before it becomes a problem.
Primer gives payment teams the autonomy to test, iterate, and optimize directly, while maintaining control, governance, and consistency across the stack.
This is just scratching the surface of what Primer can do. To find out how we can support your business, book a demo with one of our experts.
Primer in action: How we can help optimize your payment stack
There are other payment orchestration platforms on the market. But with Primer, you get a reliable, proven partner — trusted by fast-growing startups and enterprise brands alike. Backed by investors like Accel, Balderton, and ICONIQ, we power billions of dollars in payments each month.
And we don’t just promise flexibility, we can actually deliver it at scale.
Here are just a few examples of the results our customers have achieved:
- Divbrands, a global DTC ecommerce group, consolidated 19 markets under one Primer integration, eliminating dozens of dashboards and slashing engineering overhead to near zero.
- Banxa, a fiat‑to‑crypto gateway, recovered over $7 million in failed transactions within six months by enabling Primer’s Fallbacks without extra dev work.
- Conforama, one of Europe’s largest home‑goods retailers, overhauled its ecommerce payments stack and positioned payments as a strategic growth lever.
- Ferryhopper, a European travel booking platform, unified five PSPs and localized payment methods across 12 countries to accelerate international expansion.
- Dabble, an Australian sports betting app, boosted approval rates to 96% during peak events and recovered AUD 70,000 in a single month through smart fallback and dynamic 3DS workflows.
These are just a few success stories of many. Read more customer stories.
Transform payments from an obstacle to a growth engine with Primer
Your product’s fast. Your ops are lean. Your marketing works. But if your payments can’t keep up, growth will always hit a ceiling.
A modern payment stack isn’t about adding more tooling. It’s about building the right foundation that’s resilient, adaptable, and entirely under your control.
With Primer, you get the functionality you need to reliably execute at speed and scale, while delivering an industry-leading payment experience.
Ready to build a stack that scales with you? Book a demo with Primer and see what’s possible.
FAQs: Building a high-performing payment stack
What is a payment stack?
A payment stack is the combination of tools and services that power online payments, including PSPs, gateways, fraud tools, checkout, and reporting. Primer provides a unified infrastructure that connects all of these elements through a single integration.
Why is a strong payment stack important for growth?
Your payment stack directly impacts approval rates, conversion, and expansion into new markets. With Primer, businesses turn payments into a growth engine rather than a bottleneck by adding methods, routing transactions, and tracking performance in one place.
What makes a high-performing payment stack?
The best payment stacks are resilient, support local methods, deliver seamless checkout, allow fast iteration without engineering, and provide real-time visibility. Primer enables all five traits with orchestration, fallback logic, and a no-code workflow engine.
How can businesses optimize checkout without engineers?
Modern orchestration tools allow payment teams to configure checkout flows, add wallets, and update logic without writing code. Primer’s checkout builder lets merchants surface the right methods per customer and optimize the experience directly from the dashboard.
How do companies measure the success of their payment stack?
Payment success is measured by authorization rates, decline reasons, fraud prevention, and checkout conversion. Primer’s Observability gives teams real-time analytics across the stack so they can monitor, test, and improve performance with confidence.
