What is payment orchestration?+
Payment orchestration is a layer between your checkout and your payment providers. You integrate once; the orchestration layer connects to each provider, decides which one should take each payment, and turns their different APIs, statuses and webhooks into one. Payshen is a payment orchestration platform: it routes and records payments, while the money moves directly between your customer, your providers and you.
Why does payment orchestration matter?+
One provider is one point of failure and one price. With several, you can send each payment to the one most likely to approve it at the best cost, keep selling when one is down or stops accepting your business, and reach new markets through local providers and methods. Without an orchestration layer each provider is its own integration, dashboard and set of failure codes, and the routing logic ends up hard-coded in your checkout.
When does a business need payment orchestration?+
Usually once you have, or need, more than one provider: you sell in several countries, you are in an industry where providers limit or drop merchants (gaming, trading, adult, crypto), approval rates and fees matter at your volume, or one outage would stop your sales. With one provider in one market you may not need it yet.
What is the difference between a payment orchestrator, a gateway and a PSP?+
A payment service provider (PSP) or acquirer processes the payment and pays the money out to you under your contract with it. A gateway is the technical connection to one of them. An orchestrator sits above several: it chooses which provider handles each payment and gives you one API and one record for all of them. Payshen is an orchestrator; it does not process, acquire or settle payments.
What is smart routing?+
Smart routing chooses the provider for each payment from the results of past payments: which providers approve this kind of payment (by country, method and currency), what they charge and how fast they answer. Payshen's Smart routing learns from your own results, ranks a provider with no history by its fee, keeps a small share of payments for trying newer providers, and moves traffic away within a few dozen payments when a provider suddenly approves less. Your own rules always come first, and the decision and its reasons are recorded on every payment.
Can payment orchestration increase approval rates?+
It can, by sending each payment to the provider most likely to approve it and by moving traffic away from a provider that is failing. How much depends on your providers, markets and traffic, so Payshen measures it on your own payments, and a routing change can be tried on a share of payments first (a routing experiment) before it applies to all of them.
Does payment orchestration lower processing costs?+
When more than one provider can take a payment, routing can prefer the cheaper one where approval is comparable. Payshen works out the fee of every payment from your providers' price rules, so you see what each provider actually costs you, per payment and per month.
What happens when a provider fails? Is there failover?+
The attempt is recorded with its class. A payment is sent to the next provider (cascading, or failover) only when the first attempt definitely did not charge the customer. If the result could still become a charge, such as a timeout, nothing is retried elsewhere and the payment is marked unknown until the provider's own record settles it, so a customer is never charged twice.
Do you hold or move our money?+
No. Funds move from your customer to your provider to you, under your contracts. Payshen decides where a payment goes and records what happened. It never receives, holds or transmits funds.
Do we have to replace our providers?+
No. Connect the accounts you have. Add new ones through the marketplace when you want more reach or a better rate.
Which providers can we connect?+
Any provider in the Payshen marketplace. Connect the account you already have, or open a new one with the provider and connect it after. The providers page filters them by payment method, country and industry.
How do we integrate?+
Server to server: one REST API, SDKs for TypeScript, PHP and Python, a browser package for in-page checkout, test keys and live keys, signed webhooks, and a hosted page for customer redirects. A first test payment is one API call.
How long does integration take?+
A first test payment is one API call with a test key. Going live depends mostly on your provider contracts: once a provider has approved your account, connecting it in Payshen takes its API keys, and you can test it on its own before it takes live traffic.
Can we test a provider before going live?+
Yes. Every connection takes test payments, and each one can be tried on its own: Payshen sends a test payment through it and shows each step as the provider confirms it. Test payments never reach a live account.
Does Payshen handle card data?+
No card number reaches Payshen. Customers enter card details on pages and fields controlled by the provider, and the provider carries the card-security obligations for that data. Payshen stores no card data, so connecting it does not bring card numbers into your systems either.
Where is our data stored?+
Workspace data is stored in the European Union, in Frankfurt. Card numbers are not stored at all: customers type them on the provider's own page.
Can we see why a payment went where it went?+
Yes, every time. The transaction shows which providers were considered, which were excluded and why, which was chosen and on what basis, and every state the payment passed through.
Which payment methods do you support?+
Cards, digital wallets, pay later, Open Banking (pay by bank), crypto and local payment methods, through the same API. What is available to you depends on the providers you connect.
How much does Payshen cost?+
Payshen is priced per merchant, agreed with you, with a written quote before you sign anything. Your payment providers bill you directly under your own contracts with them; Payshen takes no share of the money that moves.
