When you rent or buy a white label payment gateway, pay attention to such a critical feature as the throughput capacity of transactions.
The throughput capacity indicates how many transactions a payment gateway can process per unit of time (usually 1 second).
How does the throughput capacity of a white label payment gateway affect the business of the payment service provider?
As long as the number of transactions entering your payment gateway does not exceed the threshold of its throughput, the processing of payments is smooth and without delays. On average, the buyer expects the payment to be completed within 1.5-2 seconds from pressing the “pay” button on the payment page of the online store or any other web-site connected to your processing system.
As soon as the threshold of the payment gateway is reached or exceeded, there may occur various unpleasant things, for example:
- The payment page on the Web site won’t load because your server (payment service provider) is overloaded with incoming requests from other customers (online stores and other services).
In this situation, the buyer unable to make a payment is almost certain to go to another website offering a similar product or service. And your merchant will be angry to have lost the buyer, and would require immediate action to eliminate such problems.
- The buyer, having clicked the “pay” button, does not receive a notification of the payment result, because their transaction is waiting to be processed in your payment gateway. And the payment gateway may need 30 seconds or more to complete it.
Meanwhile, the buyer usually concludes that something has gone wrong and that the payment has not been successful. The buyer might attempt another payment, but the second transaction will also get stuck in the queue.
Worse still, all attempts to make a payment on a web-site connected to your overloaded payment gateway will be ultimately successful. Your client/merchant will have to refund the money, charged from the buyer’s card. And you will have to apologize to the client.
If the white label payment gateway you leased reaches the limit of the throughput capacity, and the developers are unable to resolve the issue as soon as possible, you start losing the transaction processing fee. What is more, your customers might decide to go to the competitors who have a higher capacity of the system.
When creating the architecture of beGateway, a white label payment gateway, we made it scalable both horizontally and vertically to have no limits on the number of transactions processed per second. Two years ago, the maximum load for beGateway system during tests was 50 transactions per second. Those were synthetic tests, where we emulated requests to ourselves and answers from the acquiring bank.
Today in real life, beGateway, our white label payment processing solution, processes 200 transactions per second and, as requested by our customers, we are going to expand it to 1000 transactions per second.
How many transactions per second your white label payment gateway should handle is up to you and it depends on your customers’ business. But you should be confident that the developers of your white label payment gateway will be able to increase the throughput of transactions as soon as possible, otherwise if high turnover customers come to you, you risk losing them.
