The payment methods you offer at online checkout play a vital role in shaping your customer’s experience and your bottom line. With hundreds of payment methods available globally, relying solely on cards is no longer enough to meet customer expectations.
Baymard’s 2025 survey of 1,026 U.S. shoppers shows that 10% abandoned their shopping carts because there weren’t enough payment methods available. Can you afford to lose those sales?
Expanding your payment options isn’t just about preventing abandoned carts. It builds customer loyalty, reduces friction, and gives your brand a competitive edge. But adding payment methods at scale, and making sure they actually work across every market, is where most merchants run into problems.
This guide covers why multiple payment methods matter, what types exist, and how the right infrastructure, including the partner network behind it, makes them easier to deploy and manage.
Looking for a solution that can help you add new payment methods in just a few clicks? Book a call to learn more about Primer.
Four reasons to add multiple payment methods
1. Maximize conversions by reducing cart abandonment
Payment preferences vary widely by region. Offering the right mix for each market significantly increases the likelihood of a completed purchase.
It's also worth noting that 17% of consumers abandon carts due to concerns about credit card security. Offering trusted alternative payment methods can convert hesitant shoppers who would otherwise leave.
Read more about payment trends in Europe: A guide to alternative payment methods in Europe
2. Deliver a frictionless checkout experience
Online shoppers prioritize speed and simplicity. A clunky checkout process can quickly drive them away. Primer’s research showed that requiring customers to create an account or fill out long forms is one of the biggest pain points, often leading them to abandon their purchases.
One way to create a frictionless experience is by letting your customers pay using digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Shoppers check out in a few taps, with no manual card entry required. These digital wallets also inherently cover 3D Secure (3DS) authentication, removing another layer of friction. That makes them especially effective on mobile, where checkout abandonment tends to be higher.
Read more: Top reasons for cart abandonment and how to address them.
3. Enhance brand perception
Offering a wide range of payment options signals trust and elevates how customers view your brand. According to a PayPal study, 71% of consumers are more likely to complete a purchase, and 62% feel more positively about a brand, when digital wallet options like Apple Pay or Google Pay are available.
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options add a further dimension. A study by Bain found that 54% of merchants reported increased brand exposure to new customers through co-marketing activities with BNPL providers, and 46% experienced an increase in average order value when customers used BNPL.
4. Gain a competitive advantage
A seamless payment experience isn’t just a differentiator. It’s becoming a baseline expectation. Merchants that cater to diverse payment preferences attract more customers, build loyalty, and drive conversions.
At Primer, we’ve seen countless examples where merchants achieve near-instant uplift after enabling new payment methods. From reducing cart abandonment to boosting conversion rates, adopting the right payment strategies can quickly translate into measurable results and improved customer satisfaction.
Take a look at our case studies to learn more.
What are the different payment methods?
Understanding the landscape helps you prioritize what to offer and where. The main categories are:
- Credit and debit cards: Widely used globally and a must-have for any business. Major networks include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover.
- Mobile wallets: These wallets store payment information securely and allow users to make purchases with just a tap or scan, either in-store or online. Examples include Apple Pay and Google Pay.
- Digital wallets: Combine ease of use and security, with the ability to top-up balances. Many of these digital wallets are highly trusted by consumers. A 2023 survey even showed that 60% of consumers trust PayPal more than their bank. Digital wallets are particularly popular among unbanked populations.
- Account-to-account (A2A) payments: Direct bank transfers that bypass traditional card networks. A2A payments are cost-effective, versatile, and suited to bill payments and online purchases.
- Buy Now, Pay Later: This option provides customers with flexible payment plans, allowing them to split their purchases into installments, often interest-free. This option is particularly popular among younger, budget-conscious shoppers.
- Cash-based electronic payments: When a customer selects this option at your checkout, they're issued a voucher with a barcode. They take that voucher to a participating physical store or bank and pay in cash. You receive confirmation once payment is made. Widely used in markets with lower card penetration.
Barriers to adopting multiple payment methods
The benefits of offering multiple payment methods are clear, but adding them into your stack isn’t always straightforward. These are the most common obstacles to watch out for:
- Fees: Different payment methods carry different costs: implementation fees, transaction fees, and currency conversion charges. Understanding your volume across regions and comparing authorization rates helps you evaluate return on investment before committing.
- Engineering complexity: Adding new methods increases your payment stack’s complexity. Each comes with its own APIs and integrations. Building and maintaining pulls engineers away from core product work, and without the right tools, integrating a single new provider can take months.
- Expertise: Most businesses didn’t set out to become payment companies. Managing a growing stack of payment methods requires specialized knowledge that many teams simply don’t have in-house.
- Localization: If operating globally, localization at checkout can be difficult. Offering the right payment methods in the right markets requires dynamic logic at checkout. Presenting irrelevant options, or the wrong language, can be just as damaging as offering too few choices.
Three steps to implementing multiple payment options
1. Evaluate and negotiate with payment providers
Start by mapping out your payment needs: transaction volumes, customer preferences, and target markets. Approach providers to negotiate lower fees or explore cost-effective alternatives. Focus on solutions that align with your business model and offer competitive pricing without compromising on the features that you need.
2. Invest in scalable, integration-friendly technology
Choose a payment platform that can handle multiple providers without requiring a rebuild every time you add one. Look for platforms with APIs or plugins that reduce implementation time and support the scale you're aiming for, without costly overhauls each time the business enters a new market.
3. Partner with secure and compliant providers
Minimize risks by working with payment processors that have robust fraud prevention, encryption protocols, and compliance with standards like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Look for partners that offer tools like tokenization and multi-factor authentication to protect customer data and build trust.
How Primer makes it simple to implement multiple payment methods
Merchants looking to rapidly execute a dynamic payment method strategy are increasingly turning to unified payment infrastructure. Primer connects everything in one place: payment methods, processors, fraud tools, and reconciliation. And, there’s no need for a new integration for each new provider.
Add multiple payment options quickly without any code
Integrating payment methods typically takes months of engineering effort. With Primer, that timeline shrinks from months to hours.
With our unified infrastructure, you get instant access to a wide range of payment methods, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, ClearPay, iDEAL, and more. Primer Checkout also gives you complete control over which methods appear to which customers, presenting iDEAL to Dutch shoppers, for example, or Apple Pay only to Apple device users.
Configure Fallbacks to recover up to 22% of failed payments
When your payments fail, the cost goes beyond lost revenue. It means frustrated customers and damage to your brand.
Primer lets you easily integrate with multiple processors and set up automated Fallbacks that retry a failed payment immediately through an alternative processor. Building retry logic, managing multiple PSP integrations, and interpreting inconsistent decline codes, manually can take weeks. With Primer, it takes a few clicks.
Many of our merchants using Fallbacks are seeing impressive results, with an average recovery rate of 20% when immediately retrying payments with an alternative processor.
Read more: Banxa deploys Primer to break down barriers to crypto adoption
Monitor the performance of all your payment methods in one place with Observability
Fragmented data across providers makes it hard to see what's actually working, let alone optimize your strategy. Each PSP uses its own data structures and reporting formats, forcing teams to manually reconcile any inconsistencies.
Primer’s Observability solution consolidates data and real-time insights from all your payment methods into one unified platform, with 100+ visualizations and 30+ filters, so you can slice by payment method, region, or customer segment and act quickly.
Primer can also help you:
- Minimize 3DS friction and enhance approval rates with adaptive 3D Secure (3DS).
- Boost authorization rates and reduce fraud using network tokenization.
- Maximize cost efficiency and transaction success with intelligent payment routing.
- Partner with a team of experts committed to helping you refine and elevate your payment strategy.
Ready to improve your payment strategy? Book a call with our experts.
How Conforama used Primer to launch new payment methods in days rather than months
One of Europe’s leading home furnishings retailers Conforama operates across in-store, online, and marketplace channels. It's a setup that demands a payment solution capable of handling complexity without slowing the business down. That's what led them to Primer.
By leveraging Primer’s unified payments infrastructure, Conforama gained the flexibility to adapt quickly to regional payment preferences and roll out multiple payment methods without burdening its engineering team.
Since adopting Primer, Conforama has streamlined payment flows from checkout to reconciliation, delivering higher authorization rates, smoother transactions, and a better overall checkout experience. Payments shifted from a backend necessity to a strategic lever for conversions and customer satisfaction.
Learn more: Reimagining the role of payments at Conforama
Accept multiple payment methods as a competitive advantage
Offering the right payment methods in the right markets is no longer optional for businesses that want to scale. The question is how you get there without the integration overhead that’s held merchants back for years.
With the right infrastructure and the right partner network behind it, adding payment methods goes from being an engineering project to a commercial decision. That's the difference between a payment stack that holds you back and one that grows with you.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Do multiple payment options help conversion rates?
Offering multiple payment options can help increase your conversion rate by providing customers with more convenient and flexible payment choices. When customers have a payment method that they trust and are comfortable with, they are more likely to complete the purchase.
What is the most common payment method?
The most common payment method varies by region and industry. Credit and debit cards are the most widely used globally, but digital wallets like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay are dominant in markets like the US and the UK.
How many payment options should I offer?
The number of payment options you should offer depends on your business needs and customer preferences. Too few limits your customer base, while too many can overwhelm shoppers at checkout. A good rule of thumb is to offer at least three payment options, including a card option, a mobile wallet, and an alternative payment method like Apple Pay or Google Pay. From there, localization logic comes into play: presenting the right methods to the right customers matters more than the total number of options you support.
How does Primer for Partners expand my payment options?
Primer for Partners is a network of payment service providers, alternative payment methods, and adjacent services that are built directly into Primer's platform. Because partners own and maintain their own integrations, the network expands continuously without requiring you to integrate each provider separately. You get access to a growing ecosystem of payment methods, all activated through your existing Primer setup.
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