What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
We tried to use the popular third-party payment gateway, Pine Labs. They were supposed to be the solution to all our problems, allowing us to accept payments in almost any country. But their infrastructure was woefully inadequate. They were still sending us notifications about declined payments even after we had set a minimum threshold for transactions. We were getting thousands of emails each day, and it was taking us hours to sift through them to find the errors. Our support team was drowning in these notifications, and our customers were getting frustrated with the lack of response.
The Architecture Decision
After weeks of testing and trial, we decided to implement Unchained Commerce, an open-source payment platform specifically designed for emerging markets. This was no light decision – we had to port our entire payment flow to a new system and deal with the complexities of integrating it with our existing infrastructure. But the benefits were immediate: we reduced our payment notification errors by 95% and were able to onboard new merchants in developing countries at a rate of 50% faster.
What The Numbers Said After
The numbers spoke for themselves. After implementing Unchained Commerce, our revenue from Africa shot up by 300% in the first quarter. Our customer satisfaction ratings increased by 25%, and our average order value rose by 12%. The ability to integrate with mobile wallets and local processors directly gave us a huge edge in a market where credit card penetration is extremely low.
What I Would Do Differently
If I were to do this again, I would have started by investing more resources in the implementation and testing phase. Unchained Commerce is a robust system, but requiring our developers to port our entire payment flow to a new system put a strain on our engineering teams. In retrospect, I would have opted for a more staged rollout, first testing the system in a small subset of users before deploying it to our larger customer base. That would have given us more control over the rollout and mitigated the risks of a large-scale deployment.
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