Choosing a payment gateway

The most expensive gateway mistake is a vault you cannot leave. If stored card tokens are proprietary and non-exportable, migrating providers means asking every customer to re-enter their card — which in practice means losing a slice of your recurring revenue.

Ask explicitly, in writing: can tokens be exported to another PCI-compliant provider, on what timeline, and at what cost? A provider confident in its product will say yes.

Most businesses eventually need more than one channel: online checkout, phone orders through a virtual terminal, in-person payments, invoices with a pay-now link, and recurring billing. Assembling those from four vendors means four reconciliations and four support queues.

A single platform with one ledger across channels removes an entire category of month-end work, which is usually worth more than a few basis points of rate difference.

Ask what happens if volume triples in a month, what triggers a rolling reserve, how reserves are released, and what the actual settlement schedule is. Sudden holds have killed more otherwise-healthy businesses than pricing ever has.

For anything in a higher-risk vertical, insist on speaking to an underwriter before signing rather than discovering the appetite limits after go-live.

Published uptime history and a real status page. Signed webhooks with retries and a replay tool. A sandbox that simulates declines, disputes and partial captures rather than only happy paths. Idempotency keys on every write endpoint. Named support with a response-time commitment.

Run a two-week sandbox integration before signing anything. Documentation quality during that fortnight predicts your next three years accurately.