Payment orchestration: insights from Back Market and Payplug

In today’s ever-evolving e-commerce landscape, payment orchestration has emerged as a sophisticated response to the challenges faced by high-volume merchants. With the diversification of payment methods and a growing need for performance, this strategy helps maximise acceptance rates, controls costs, and streamlines payment flows.

But what exactly is payment orchestration, and how can it transform your conversion strategy?

To explore this growing trend among leading French e-commerce players, we've summarised key insights from a conversation between Riccardo Argenta, Head of Payment at Back Market, Europe's leading marketplace for refurbished electronics, and Flora Wolfer, CMO of Payplug, during their appearance on the podcast “Les Digital Doers.”

What is payment orchestration, and how does it work?

"A few years ago, some merchants still saw payment as a mere commodity. Today, they view it as a true lever for conversion and business performance." - Flora Wolfer, CMO of Payplug.

The evolution of payment processing has turned it into a strategic asset, prompting merchants to develop specialised in-house expertise. At the heart of this shift is payment orchestration, a solution that enables merchants to optimise each transaction individually.

Payment orchestration is an intelligent software layer that allows merchants to manage multiple payment service providers (PSPs). Acting as an advanced control tower, this technology centralises the management of financial flows and routes each transaction to the most relevant PSP based on specific criteria, including acceptance rate, transaction costs, geography, and card type.

What are the concrete benefits of payment orchestration?

Significantly higher acceptance rates

The first major advantage of orchestration is enhanced payment performance. Since adopting a multi-PSP strategy, Back Market has seen its acceptance rate increase by 15-20%.*

This optimisation relies on the ability to intelligently route each transaction to the most relevant PSP for the context. Payment orchestration identifies PSPs with deep local market expertise. For example, a payment provider in Japan will likely understand the Japanese market far better than a PSP based in the US or France.

This geographical specialisation significantly optimises performance, particularly in international markets where each issuer may have unique technical specifications.

Measurable reduction in transaction costs

Payment orchestration also transforms the economic equation of payment processing. By diversifying providers and optimising flow allocation, Back Market succeeded in reducing its payment costs by 30%, according to Ricardo Argenta.* This represents a considerable financial gain for a marketplace of this scale.

This financial optimisation doesn't come at the expense of performance—quite the contrary. It results from allocating transactions more efficiently, with each PSP leveraged in its zone of excellence.

Guaranteed service continuity

Diversifying payment providers provides a vital safeguard against technical incidents. Payment orchestration allows for automatic bypass mechanisms that instantly reroute payment flows when a PSP experiences downtime.

This level of resilience is especially critical during peak periods such as Black Friday. Indeed, A big part of Back Market's growth comes from the fourth quarter*. Even short-lived disruptions during this time can lead to substantial losses.

How to implement an effective payment orchestration strategy?

Methodical deployment planning

Rolling out a payment orchestration architecture requires a rigorous and progressive approach. Far from being a simple technical switch, this type of project fundamentally reshapes payment management. Back Market's experience reveals that a realistic timeline is essential: their migration from a single PSP to a multi-PSP architecture (6-7 providers) took nearly 24 months.*

This long-term deployment secures existing flows while gradually integrating new partners, all without compromising overall system performance.

Orchestration as a cross-functional project

The success of an orchestration strategy relies on mobilising diverse expertise across the organisation. At Back Market, around 40 people from finance, product, and tech teams are involved in tackling payment-related challenges.*

These multidisciplinary teams meet regularly in steering committees to track progress and coordinate actions. This cross-functional approach makes the most of orchestration’s potential, going beyond simply juxtaposing PSPs to create true payment intelligence tailored to each use case.

What technical challenges should be anticipated for successful orchestration?

Data standardisation and continuous monitoring

One of the main challenges of orchestration is harmonising data from different PSPs. Data quality and consistency are essential for fairly assessing provider performance and continuously optimising routing strategies.

To address this, Back Market has implemented a sophisticated monitoring system with dedicated teams continuously analysing payment performance. Among their key KPIs are:

• Acceptance rate: number of completed payments relative to total attempts
• Payment page conversion rate: number of completed payments relative to visitors reaching checkout

This constant monitoring allows quick detection of issues related to payment methods or specific user segments. It facilitates the ongoing optimisation of routing rules, creating a virtuous circle of performance improvement.

Leveraging local expertise

Orchestration values PSP specialisation, whether geographical or sector-based. This targeted expertise becomes a major asset, allowing PSPs to provide superior knowledge of specific markets or payment challenges, and in turn, higher acceptance rates.

For Payplug, this specialisation is characterised by:

• In-depth knowledge of the French and European markets
• Payment institution approval by the ACPR (French Prudential Supervision Authority)
• Privileged relationships with local issuers as a subsidiary of one of Europe's leading card issuers

This close proximity to banking players allows Payplug to anticipate technical and regulatory developments and quickly adapt to new protocols to maintain optimal performance.

"When an issuer modifies its technical implementation, the ability to quickly obtain precise information and adapt accordingly becomes a major competitive advantage," emphasises Flora Wolfer.

Conclusion

In a market where every conversion point counts, payment orchestration delivers three concrete competitive advantages:

1. Immediate financial performance: lower  transaction costs and higher conversion rates that directly boost margins
2. Operational agility: the ability to quickly integrate new payment methods and adapt to regulatory changes without technical friction
3. Guaranteed scalability: infrastructure designed to absorb seasonal activity peaks and organic growth without compromising service quality

In this context, Payplug, an expert in the French and European markets, positions itself as a key partner for payment orchestrators. Thanks to our expertise and close ties with European payment players, we offer among the highest acceptance rates in the market and a deep understanding of local specificities.

Want to discover how Payplug can integrate into your multi-PSP strategy and boost your payment performance in France and Europe?

*Source: Back Market - Podcast #218 Les Digital Doers