In 2025, with global e-commerce sales projected to reach between $6.8 trillion and $6.86 trillion, payment infrastructure is emerging as a critical enabler of merchant growth. E-commerce businesses can’t rely on fragmented systems or outdated workflows. They need scalable payment solutions that can adapt to evolving regulations, customer expectations, and market demands.
This guide outlines the strategic foundations and practical solutions required to scale your e-commerce payment infrastructure with precision and resilience.
Key e-commerce payment infrastructure challenges
Long payment cycles and cash flow gaps
Many businesses still rely on outdated invoicing practices, delayed settlements, and rigid payment terms. Long processing times for refunds, delayed payouts from marketplaces, or rigid billing cycles for subscription services can quickly strain cash flow. These delays affect liquidity, forecasting, and operational flexibility, making it harder to react to demand spikes or invest in growth.
Poor checkout experience
A slow or confusing checkout remains one of the top conversion killers. Cluttered payment pages, missing local methods, and unnecessary steps lead to abandonment, making checkout optimisation essential for improving conversion rates.
Fragmented payment ecosystems
Many companies operate with multiple disconnected PSPs, acquirers, and tools. This creates operational silos, inconsistent reporting, and difficulties in managing transaction routing or downtime. Without a unified payment layer, scaling to new markets or methods becomes slow and costly.
Complexity of compliance and security
Compliance requirements – from PCI DSS 4.0 and SCA to KYC/AML and tax regulations – are increasing globally. Managing these obligations across multiple regions and providers is complex and expensive, often adding significant operational overhead.
Rising fraud threats
Fraudsters exploit the growing volume and value of digital transactions. Account takeovers, card testing, fake invoicing, and phishing remain persistent threats. Without strong controls, businesses face financial loss, operational chaos, and brand damage.
Cross-border payment friction
Complex and costly cross-border transactions often slow global expansion. Foreign exchange markups, banking delays, and lack of real-time visibility make international payments unpredictable. These issues also complicate treasury planning and customer experience.
Lack of visibility and control
With data scattered across multiple platforms and providers, many businesses struggle to get a clear picture of payment performance. This lack of unified reporting and analytics makes it hard to optimise acceptance rates, routing strategies, costs, and risk management.
Strategies to overcome these challenges
- Streamline payment cyclesby digitising invoicing, embedding real-time payments, and automating how payments are collected and reconciled.
- Optimise checkout experienceswith local payment methods, frictionless flows, and adaptive UX.
- Consolidate the payment stackthrough orchestration to simplify operations, routing, and redundancy.
- Embed compliance and securitywith automated checks, tokenisation, and PCI DSS–compliant infrastructure.
- Strengthen fraud defencesusing AI-driven monitoring, MFA, and secure payment instruments.
- Simplify cross-border paymentswith modern platforms offering transparent foreign exchange, local rails, and real-time tracking.
- Centralise data and insightsto improve visibility, routing decisions, and cost control.
Solving online payment infrastructure complexity
The complexity of e-commerce payments – with their mix of payment methods, currencies, regions, and compliance demands – calls for more than fragmented integrations. It demands a unified orchestration layer that connects your entire payment stack, adapts to changing market demands, and supports global expansion.
That’s where payment orchestration platforms like Corefy come in. Instead of managing a growing web of direct integrations with processors, acquirers, and performance tools, businesses can centralise everything through one platform.
Need to expand into a new market? Plug in a local PSP – no heavy development required. Looking to A/B test your checkout flows? Launch experiments without waiting on engineering.
This built-in flexibility accelerates time to market, cuts development costs, and allows teams to stay focused on product and growth. At the same time, you gain powerful capabilities like smart routing, automatic failover, and granular reporting, ensuring higher performance, resilience, and control across every transaction.
Conclusion
In 2025, e-commerce payments are becoming more complex, but also more powerful. Businesses that adopt scalable payment solutions – built on orchestration, localisation, automation, and intelligence – will unlock faster growth and stronger customer trust.
