Item: Checkout.com
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company needs to collect payments online from end users. We offer food ordering online, and our brands are spread across 70+ countries. For our business, it's important to offer the best user experience - a seamless payment flow to increase loyalty and overall satisfaction with the order process. Apart from that, we need to support several acquirers per market, more than 1 gateway for backup processing. We need a reliable partner with a high uptime because we used to have a partner before who was frequently down. Another problem is provider support, many either don't offer it or its quality is low. Our payment setup is very complex, and we need a solution that fits all cases. Checkout.com is one of my key providers for online card acquiring across different regions. I use their gateway, aggregator, and acquiring solutions in MENA and APAC regions. They work with all top acquirers in each market, support several gateways. Apart from that, I use their PRISM product to set up fraud rules and to blacklist suspicious customers. On a daily basis, I use their merchant dashboard to download transaction reports and check invoices. The Checkout.com team helps me with performance analysis and investigations, consults on new products, and supports during API upgrade/implementation process.

Pros and Cons

Processing is stable, Checkout is never down, high uptime
Acquiring and gateway performance is excelled
Anti-fraud tool is great, has a lot of risk filters and a shadow mode, an easy to use tool
Amazing merchant support
Best pricing/fees
Work with all top acquirers
Great success rate
Support both network and gateway tokens
APIs are easy

It would be great to have acquiring license in more countries
It wont be easy to merge to merchant accounts
Token migration (from Checkout) might take a lot of time
They don't provide a settlement report (list of transactions that fall under a current payout) or a list of transactions that were included in an invoice (gateway fee)

Return on Investment

We were able to launch local acquiring in 3-4 new markets (they support all top acquirers if they act as a gateway)
We were able to improve the Acceptance rate by+1-3pp gradually (through performance optimizations and support from Checkout.com side - they share expertise and help investigate ways to improve performance). In one particular market, we improved performance by switching processing to another gateway Checkout.com supports. And in another market, we improved the success rate by shifting traffic from another provider. In a third market, we also switched from another provider and improved the stability (the previous provider had a lower uptime)
We decreased cost massively - thanks to their great pricing model we were able to reduce cost by expanding their services and launching them in 4 more markets
We saved around 3-4 months of development when launching online payments in a new market thanks to their global coverage

Checkout.com Global Solution

Checkout.com indeed has both local knowledge and expertise on most, if not all, providers/acquirers in each market. We are able to rely on them when making some payments related decisions due to our history of working together, like choosing a default gateway or an acquirer. Thanks to Checkout.com, we can support multiple acquirers and gateways. We were able to launch some of our new projects that have a different background than our main business, but Checkout.com is very open in supporting us and sharing their knowledge to help us grow.
When launching a new product, sometimes Checkout.com consults us in terms of legal requirements. In some cases, they were able to use their license to 'sponsor' our new product.

Support Rating

They are always responsive - we usually get a response within 5-10 min. We frequently ask for their advice, and we know it is reliable. They are really experts in all markets where they work. They recommended us a few acquirers and also introduced us to 2 of them when we asked for it. They help us with benchmarks - this helps immensely because then we are able to compare our success rate vs. the industry. In MENA markets, I frequently use their regulatory advice because there are many market-specific restrictions that merchants must abide by.
We perform daily success rate checks and payment rejection rate analysis. In all cases, we get support from Checkout.com. They even reach out to gateways or schemes directly if this helps to resolve an issue.

Alternatives Considered

Stripe, Adyen, CyberSource, Mastercard Payment Gateway and Worldpay from FIS

Better pricing - we got the best offer from Checkout.com vs other providers.
Great support and knowledge sharing - during performance analysis or payments related investigations Checkout.com is more response and the quality of their support is higher.
Great anti-fraud solution - they offer a bit more complex filters, some features are unique like a shadow mode, this solution is also cheaper than most other providers.
Amazing stability and uptime - other providers were down or were underperforming more frequently.
They support more markets, more acquirers.

Key Insights

Do you think Checkout.com delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Checkout.com's feature set?

Yes

Did Checkout.com live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Checkout.com go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Checkout.com again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Checkout.com will be a great choice for a merchant with a significant transaction count - they meet the needs of the biggest merchants.
It is a trusted partner of ours and they are clearly focused on a long-term partnership with their clients. They grow fast as a company - launching new markets, new payment options, and products. Checkout.com listens to the needs of their clients and they are usually flexible in terms of adding new functionalities/features/payment methods.
Plus I already recommended them to my colleagues, and we expanded our cooperation to more markets.

Users and Roles

100 - We have fraud team, analytics, business, product, and tech teams that are directly or indirectly connected to Checkout.com (for example: tech integrates, upgrades API, fixes bugs; product scopes and plans, new payment methods, and new features that we need from Checkout.com). There is also Finance and Accounting, which is responsible for reconciliation of processed transactions.

Support Headcount Required

50 - It's mostly Finance and Accounting - they reconcile transactions on a daily basis and in case of discrepancies they reach out to Checkout.com, they are involved in refunding transactions along with Customer Support team.
Then there is Business and Operations, which is leading preference analysis, traffic routing, payments related investigations. Besides that, the tech team which is responsible for monitoring.

Business Processes Supported

Easy reconciliation and online performance analysis - Checkout.com provides great detailed reports, and decline reasons are described well online for a reference
Dashboard updates transactions immediately, which helps during live monitoring (especially right after a feature or a new payment method launch). We check live traffic and can see transaction details like issuing bank, BIN, type of transaction, ARN, etc.
Fraud solution is great: when we need to quickly restrict a fraudulent user or set a new rule to trigger 3ds - fraud dashboard is user friendly, unlike most solutions on the market, it also offers to apply most filters online (again, many providers don't allow merchants to manage rules)
Compliance - Checkout.com offers many roles so we can define which user will have which access level (like only view transaction or can refund payments but not see tech settings etc)

Innovative Uses

Checkout.com fraud solution offers a shadow mode where we are able to test different strategies and estimate results without actually restricting the traffic. Once we are happy with the outcome, we apply the filters on production. The tool is intuitive and fits well with our complex requests and use cases
Checkout.com helps us monitor performance, alters if success rate drops, provides gateway reports when 3rd party gateways are down

Future Planned Uses

We might use the acquiring for offline payments processing
We might use their KYC and payout solution (for sub merchants)

Likelihood to Renew

We have a long term contract and we already have them in our plans for the next 5 years.

Checkout.com Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Due to the size of our business we get the best support by default. Checkout.com has several merchant tech support employees assigned to us due to the complexity we have and the amount of support we require on a daily basis. Apart from that, we can get quick and fast support from their Product or Tech team (for example when we need to add a new feature or get guidance regarding certain parts of their API, etc.)

Bug Resolution

Yes - We report them from time to time, almost all cases are around routing rules (we have a complicated setup and need to use many filters, some conflict and we escalate to get clarification).

Exceptional Examples of Checkout.com Support

Actually this happened a few times. Firstly, when they didn't have 247 support, their merchant support manager was helping us fix performance (during 3rd party downtimes) after working hours and during weekends.
Secondly, we had an internal incident when we needed to refund a huge amount of transactions and we got help from the Checkout.com team to process these.
Finally, they changed their roadmap to assist us (we needed a new payment method urgently).

Scalability

Our tech team implemented payments API to process payments online. Analytics team receives transaction repots that we use to build our own performance dashboards and help to reconcile transactions.
API is indeed flexible - we don't use all features but if required we can easily implement them. When Checkout.com adds new features or functionalities, some of them can be used even on an older API version which saved us tech resources and implementation time.
We use the same API to expand into new markets - technically we don't need to change anything when we want to launch payments in a new country.

Reliability and Availability

In the last 3 years that I have been working with Checkout.com, they had an unplanned outage that lasted less than a few minutes. Their uptime is amazing. If they have maintenance, unlike banks, they don't have downtime during this time.
We frequently require their support and Checkout.com responds to us within minutes. When we have important rollouts, I schedule calls with our merchant support manager to monitor the rollout/perform tests, etc. It is always easy to find time lost even with short notice.

Performance

Checkout.com performance as an acquirer and a PSP is excellent.
We have too many transactions per day, therefore reports take some time to generate before they are available for downloading. But it indeed takes reasonable time.
We use native/h2h integration therefore, there is no redirection issue, all pages load quickly on our side.
Based on my experience, Checkout.com will never never integrate with software or systems that will slow them down. Amongst all payment methods they offer, all are processed immediately, without delays.

Checkout.com - Trusted Long Term Partner for global acquiring

Overall Satisfaction with Checkout.com