Multiple Gateways for redundancy

It is a rare occurrence for a payment gateway provider to suffer a complete failure of service but it can happen, last year in fact it did happen when Authorize.net suffered a complete failure of service, leaving thousands of online stores without a payment gateway.

Since then there has been a massive rise in the number of websites offering multiple payment gateways in order to provide redundancy – in effect a ‘spare’ gateway to fall back upon in the even that the main gateway fails.

Redundancy in systems is always a good thing to plan for in any complicated machine and an ecommerce website is a very complicated machine. The good thing with a website is that nothing need be wasted. ‘Redundant’ gateways can be very useful in giving customers a choice of payment providers to suit their preference and some gateways can give you abilities that others cannot so having multiple gateways gives your customers far more options and enables more customers to buy with confidence in your site.

It can be hard to choose from so many available gateways but Advansys would always recommend working with two gateways, one that is inline with your website, so that the branding, payment process and perception of never leaving the site is strong and consistent, and another gateway that is hosted offsite, for instance Paypal’s hosted integration. Many buyers believe in the security of their preferred hosted gateway over and above a branded inline solution and will prefer this route.