Cross-Border Payments
April 24, 2025
Merchants are navigating complex markets and higher acquisition costs, yet payment systems are often treated as back-end infrastructure rather than drivers of growth.
The decade-long era of effortless e-commerce growth is over. Rising customer acquisition costs, intensifying competition, and shifting consumer sentiment have created a new reality—one where profit margins are thin and every percentage point of conversion matters.
Merchants are certainly adapting, but slowly. Many still view payment technologies as a necessary utility, rather than a driver of growth. This is where fintech providers must step in—not with generic offerings, but tailored, conversion-optimised solutions that directly address the economic and operational pain points of modern e-commerce businesses.
A one-size-fits-all approach to payments simply doesn’t cut it anymore. E-commerce merchants now operate in fragmented markets with different buyer behaviours, regulatory expectations, and payment preferences. Yet, too many payment providers still offer technologies that lack agility, transparency, or business support that goes beyond the onboarding stage.
The future surely lies in custom-fit payment solutions: adaptable, optimised, and localised to support every stage of a merchant’s journey. That means:
While merchants (rightly) obsess over website design, SEO, and sales funnels, the checkout experience often gets overlooked. This is a major disconnect—and one that payment providers can help to solve.
Global shopping cart abandonment rates hover at around 70%, and a growing body of data shows that a user’s checkout experience has a dramatic impact on conversion. Payment page redirects, for example, can increase the chance of a lost sale by up to 15–20% compared to embedded (iFrame) options. Multi-step checkouts also see higher abandonment rates than single pages.
If you come from a fintech background, you probably know all this already. But many merchants are unaware of these trade-offs—or lack the resources to address them properly.
Payment providers must reframe their role accordingly, educating merchants that their payment stack should be treated as an integral part of the sales funnel that can reduce friction, increase conversion, and boost customer trust.
Inflation is still a major concern for 64% of global consumers, who continue to express low confidence in their national economies. Merchants are therefore under a great deal of pressure, as they not only need to deliver seamless experiences to price-conscious shoppers, but also require their own stable financial flows.
In this landscape, e-commerce businesses are increasingly opting for blended pricing—ideally using flat rates. Although interchange++ is in theory more transparent and less costly, grey areas exist surrounding processing fees and the model lacks the predictability of flat-rate, blended pricing.
It seems then, that In uncertain times many companies prefer to have a clear understanding of their costs upfront in order to better predict monthly expenses. This shows a need for support that goes beyond competitive pricing—we need to empower merchants with the right tools to predict cash flow more effectively.
It’s also important to mention the need for an agile payment infrastructure. Businesses may need to shift their selling strategies quickly—expanding into new markets, adding subscription options, or trending payment methods. Providers who can’t support this kind of agility risk becoming bottlenecks.
Global cross-border e-commerce sales are forecast to grow 26% by 2030—but merchants frequently underestimate the operational and financial complexity of selling internationally. Currency conversion, regulatory barriers, and local payment preferences can make or break international expansion.
Payment companies must take a proactive role in solving these challenges, by offering:
That last point is vitally important, as many merchants incorrectly presume that Visa, Mastercard and American Express are universally popular payment methods. In reality, 24% of Spanish e-commerce transactions now flow through Bizum, while in Portugal, MB Way accounts for 45% of online payments, to use just two examples.
Providers unable to quickly and efficiently integrate a complete range of local payment options are effectively capping their merchant’s conversion rates in those markets.
One of the most powerful shifts in fintech is the emergence of closed-loop ecosystems—platforms integrating payments, banking, and other financial services into a single experience.
These ecosystems are a window into the future of e-commerce payments. By reducing intermediaries, costs can be lowered and speed increased. For merchants, the result is smoother settlements, clearer reporting, and the chance to reinvest saved fees into growth.
Payment providers must ask themselves: What parts of the ecosystem can we own—or integrate—to provide more value? The more friction we can eliminate, the more essential we become.
The market conditions for e-commerce businesses have changed. That means we—those of us building payment solutions—must stick to the role of active collaborators in conversion, customer loyalty, and profitability.
Merchants often don’t know what they’re missing until we show them. From designing payment solutions with localisation and expansion in mind to offering flexible pricing, actionable data, and tailored support, the future of e-commerce payments must be proactive and strategic, not reactive and transactional.
For those payment providers ready to step up, this is an opportunity to lead the next chapter of e-commerce—where fintech doesn’t just support a business, it can help to build it.
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