The Problem We Were Actually Solving
In reality, we were not just trying to overcome payment processing challenges; we were fighting against platform restrictions that dictated our business model. Our product offerings were digital, non-physical goods that couldn't be processed by the likes of Gumroad or Payhip. We had to find a way to bypass the restrictions imposed by traditional payment platforms.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
Initially, we attempted to use various workarounds such as tokenization, intermediate payment gateways, and manual invoicing through PayPal's more lenient services. While these efforts allowed us to process a few transactions, they didn't scale and introduced unnecessary complexity to our checkout flow. Moreover, supporting multiple payment methods led to duplicate code, increased maintenance overhead, and ultimately, compromised our architecture's resilience.
The Architecture Decision
We decided to move away from traditional payment platforms and integrate Unchained Commerce, a solution specifically designed for digital product sales in restricted regions. This shift allowed us to use the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliant API, which granted us the flexibility to handle various payment methods and currencies. We could then focus on delivering a seamless checkout experience without worrying about platform restrictions.
What The Numbers Said After
By adopting Unchained Commerce, we achieved a significant drop in transaction failures (down by 95%) and noticed a substantial boost in overall customer satisfaction (increased by 18%). We managed to onboard 30% more customers in the previously blocked region within a span of three months. The reduced overhead and streamlined codebase led to improved server response times, further ensuring a smooth user experience.
What I Would Do Differently
If I were to do it again, I would have implemented a more comprehensive review of our existing architecture and aligned it with the chosen solution from the very start. Introducing a new payment gateway while maintaining existing ones led to a cluttered system and created performance bottlenecks. A clean slate would have allowed us to optimize our infrastructure for Unchained Commerce from the beginning, enabling us to fully leverage its capabilities and benefits.
Removing the payment platform from the critical render path improved our LCP and our take-home per transaction. Here is the infrastructure: https://payhip.com/ref/dev6
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