Reviewed by Mayer Hyman, Payments Specialist | Reviewed for accuracy July 2026
Key Takeaways
- Running separate gateways for in-store, online, mobile, and subscription payments creates duplicate integrations, siloed reporting, and inconsistent checkout experiences that cost conversions.
- Checkout abandonment averages 70.19% across dozens of studies, and payment-related friction (limited payment methods, distrust, declined cards) is consistently among the top cited reasons (Baymard Institute).
- Worldwide card fraud losses hit $33.41 billion in 2024, and fragmented fraud tooling across multiple gateways makes it harder to catch patterns that a single, unified view would flag (The Nilson Report).
- Consolidation isn’t free. Merchants should weigh migration effort, vendor lock-in risk, and reporting continuity against the operational savings before switching.
- The right question isn’t “how many gateways do I have,” it’s “how much duplicated work, siloed data, and inconsistent customer experience is that number creating.”
Why Multi-Gateway Setups Happen in the First Place
Most merchants don’t set out to run multi-gateway payment processing across five systems. Instead, it happens gradually: one gateway for the original storefront, another added when a mobile app launched, a third bolted on for a new subscription product, and a fourth inherited through an acquisition or a regional expansion. Each addition made sense in isolation; however, the problem shows up later, when nobody owns the full picture.
Different sales channels genuinely do have different payment needs. A retailer with a physical store, an e-commerce site, and a marketplace presence may have started with three separate integrations. This often happens simply because no single provider covered all three well at the time. Over years, that patchwork becomes the default architecture rather than a temporary fix.
What Running Multiple Gateways Actually Costs You
Checkout Friction and Lost Conversions
Across 48 aggregated studies, the average documented online checkout abandonment rate is 70.19% (Baymard Institute, 2024-2025 data). Specifically, friction tied to the payment step is consistently among the top reasons shoppers cited for walking away; examples include limited payment methods, distrust of the checkout, or cards being declined. This problem compounds under multi-gateway payment processing, because each gateway renders its own checkout flow with different fields, different verification steps, and different error messages.
Baymard’s separate checkout usability research also finds that concerns like “I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information” and “the checkout process was too long or complicated” rank among the top reasons for abandonment. Notably, this happens specifically during the checkout step, not earlier in the funnel (Baymard Institute). A disjointed multi-gateway checkout is a plausible contributor to both.
Siloed Data and Slower Decisions
When transactions run through several gateways, refund data, failed-payment logs, interchange costs, and chargeback records live in different dashboards with different formats. As a result, pulling a single, accurate view of payment performance means exporting from each system and reconciling it manually. Alternatively, teams end up building custom tooling just to answer basic questions like “what’s our true decline rate this month.”
That reconciliation tax rarely shows up as a line item. Instead, it shows up in the extra hours a finance or ops team spends every month, and in decisions that teams make on partial data because nobody had time to build the full picture.
Fragmented Fraud Detection
Fraud losses are a real and growing cost for the industry. Worldwide payment card fraud losses reached $33.41 billion in 2024, according to The Nilson Report, the leading trade publication tracking the global card industry. That number reflects the whole payments ecosystem, not multi-gateway merchants specifically. However, the mechanics of fragmentation make the underlying problem worse for merchants who run several disconnected systems.
Fraud signals like device fingerprinting, payment velocity, and behavioral patterns are most useful when a fraud engine can see transactions across all channels at once. When they’re split across separate gateways, however, each one carries its own fraud tooling and its own partial view of the customer. As a result, patterns that would be obvious in a unified system can slip through unnoticed until the chargeback arrives.
Duplicated Engineering and Vendor Overhead
Every gateway integration means a separate API to maintain, a separate tokenization scheme, and its own testing cycle whenever either side pushes an update. For example, adding a new payment method, like a wallet or a buy-now-pay-later option, often means repeating that work across every gateway rather than doing it once.
The vendor side adds up too: separate compliance reviews, separate SLA monitoring, and separate account teams. None of it is dramatic on its own; together, however, it’s a meaningful chunk of a payments team’s time that isn’t going toward anything customer-facing.
The Case for Consolidation, and Its Limits
Bringing payment channels under a single gateway or orchestration layer can address most of the problems above: one API surface, one reporting environment, one fraud strategy that sees the full transaction picture, and one PCI compliance scope instead of several. For example, for a retailer adding subscription billing, that can mean a configuration change instead of a new integration project.
Consolidation isn’t automatically the right move for every merchant, though, and it isn’t free. For example, migration takes time and engineering effort. Historical reporting, in turn, doesn’t always map cleanly onto a new system, especially custom fields or legacy report structures. In addition, centralizing routing, tokenization, and fraud tools with one provider raises a fair question about vendor dependence, and this holds true even when that provider supports multiple underlying processors and card networks.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Consolidate
Before moving toward a single gateway or an orchestration layer, it’s worth getting clear answers on a few things. How much of your historical reporting will actually migrate versus require remapping? Will your existing integrations and APIs keep working during a transition period? In addition, consider how dependent you’d become on one provider versus one abstraction layer over multiple providers, what the realistic cost picture looks like once migration and any new platform fees are factored in, and how long payment processing might be disrupted during the cutover given your specific architecture.
None of these questions have a universal answer. A merchant with a simple e-commerce setup and one recurring-billing product will have a very different migration than one running custom ERP integrations across five sales channels. Because of this, getting an honest, case-specific answer before committing matters more than the general direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does consolidating payment gateways always reduce costs?
Not always. Merchants often see fewer integrations to maintain and lower administrative overhead, but migration costs, potential platform fees for premium features, and switching costs from deeper dependence on one provider can offset some of the savings. The net effect depends on the merchant’s existing setup and how the consolidation is priced.
Will my historical payment data transfer if I switch to a single gateway?
Transaction history, settlement records, and core reporting data typically carry over to some degree, but custom fields, legacy report structures, and highly customized exports may not map one-to-one. Merchants with complex reporting workflows should plan for some remapping work rather than assume a clean transfer.
Does using one payment gateway mean I’m locked into one processor?
Not necessarily. Some unified gateways and orchestration platforms sit as a layer over multiple underlying processors and card networks, so you can retain routing flexibility even with a single point of integration. That said, your fraud tools, tokenization, and reporting are typically centralized within that layer, so it’s worth understanding exactly what stays flexible and what doesn’t before switching.
How long does a gateway migration usually take?
It varies widely based on how complex the existing setup is. A simple integration might take hours or days to cut over, while architecture with multiple APIs, recurring billing, ERP integrations, and custom reporting can take weeks, since downstream effects on billing and customer workflows need to be tested carefully.
Is running multiple payment gateways ever the right choice?
Yes, in some cases. Multiple gateways can offer wider regional coverage, redundancy if one provider has an outage, and routing flexibility that lowers direct processing costs. The tradeoff, however, is the operational, data, and fraud-detection complexity described above. Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends on transaction volume, geographic footprint, and how much internal capacity a business has to manage multiple vendor relationships well.
If you’re trying to map out what a more consolidated payment architecture would actually look like for your specific setup, consider starting there. A conversation with a Cartis payments specialist is a reasonable place to work through the tradeoffs above with your own numbers. The consolidation pressure shows up differently depending on who’s driving it — see How is Gen Z influencing your payment stack? for the demand-side version, and Patients don’t care why their health savings account card was declined for how it plays out in a vertical like healthcare.
