The payment gateway is your digital business’s cash register: everything else can be perfect, but if the payment fails, there’s no sale. Choosing wrong costs you twice — extra fees every month, and a painful migration later.
This is the short guide we wish we’d had.
First: how does YOUR customer pay?
Answer this before comparing fees. The “cheapest” gateway is useless if it doesn’t offer the method your customer uses:
- Selling to Latin America? You need PSE, Nequi, cash and local cards. Regional gateways (Wompi, MercadoPago) dominate here.
- Selling to the US or Europe? Stripe is the standard: cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and dozens of currencies.
- Selling subscriptions? Stripe has the most mature recurring billing system on the market: plans, trials, upgrades and automatic retries on failed charges.
- A marketplace with multiple vendors? You need split payments, and here the options narrow: Stripe Connect or MercadoPago Marketplace.
The criteria that actually matter
- Local payment methods. The checkout must speak your customer’s payment language.
- Real total cost. Add percentage + fixed fee + payout cost + currency conversion. The “visible” fee is never the full cost.
- Payout speed. Does the money reach your account in 1 day or 14? For a business with tight cash flow, this outweighs half a point of commission.
- Failed payment handling. Automatic retries and fraud detection recover revenue that otherwise vanishes silently.
- Integration quality. Reliable webhooks, clear documentation and a decent test environment. A gateway with a bad API gets expensive in development and in errors.
Our practical recommendation
In the projects we build, the winning combination is usually hybrid:
- A regional gateway (Wompi or MercadoPago depending on the country) for local methods: PSE, Nequi, cash.
- Stripe for international cards and subscriptions.
That’s how we designed NexoShop, where Wompi, MercadoPago and Stripe come integrated from the start: the customer chooses how to pay and the system routes each charge through the right rails.
The most expensive mistake: a careless integration
The gateway matters less than how it’s integrated. The errors that cost the most money aren’t about fees — they’re engineering errors:
- Unhandled webhooks: the customer paid, but your system never found out.
- Inconsistent payment states: orders marked “paid” with no real charge, or double charges.
- Manual reconciliation: accounting hours every month squaring what the system should have squared itself.
That’s why in our custom development projects we treat payments as the point where the system cannot afford to fail: retries, traceability and monitoring from day one.
Unsure about your specific case?
Every business has its right gateway combination — it depends on your country, your average ticket and your model. Tell us what you sell and to whom and we’ll recommend the exact payment architecture for your case, no strings attached.