Diversify your payment gateways.

If you run multiple brands/businesses online, it might be worth using multiple payment gateways just for the sake of it, as in:

• Business A runs on PayPal.
• Business B runs on Stripe.
• Business C runs on 2Checkout.
• Business D runs on Paddle.

This is doubly important if you make money primarily from monthly subscriptions.

Because with subscriptions/SaaS, if you lose your payment processor, you lose all your subscribers.

Your MRR starts from $0 again -- there's no migration process to save you.

Why bother?

Because payment processors ban people, often arbitrarily, and it happens more often than you think.

You can have a few friendly-fraud disputes on record, and all of a sudden Stripe/PayPal puts you on the ban list.

And yes, payment processors bans people (read: they blacklist your social security number), not accounts.

Which means if you have 5 Stripe accounts, and only 1 have an elevated chargeback risk, all 5 will be banned at once.

Eliminate a single point of failure

If you make a living online, this is probably the most important thing to take care of if you want to build a robust, resilient, and sustainable business.

You don't want to be in the same situation as a corporate employee, where you're beholden to just 1 person for your entire paycheck.

You want multiple platforms to cut you a check every month, so if one goes down, you have 4 more others keeping you afloat.

Here are 3 things you can do:

1. Set up redundancy

If you sell digital goods, list your products simultaneously on 2-3 different platforms/MoRs.

If 1 bans you for any reason, switch to another immediately.

You'd be surprised how hard/slow it is to get approved on a new payment gateway.

Ideally you should create custom domains for each product you sell (e.g. yourdomain.com/productName), so you can redirect that URL to whatever platform you want and swap them out when/if they ban you.

2. Use different payment gateways, even if you only have 1 business

For Zlappo, I use Stripe for subscriptions and AppSumo for LTDs.

For Zylvie, I use Paddle for subscriptions, AppSumo for LTDs, and Stripe for commissions.

So not only do I diversify my revenue model, I make sure that each revenue channel is handled by a different payment processor.

3. Use a subscriptions aggregator like Chargebee

I haven't personally used Chargebee, but I've only heard positive things.

Basically it acts as a load-balancer and spreads out your subscriptions across different payment gateways in the back-end.

So instead of putting all your subscribers on Stripe or PayPal, it puts some of them on 2Checkout and Authorize.net as well.

It's very unlikely that all your payment gateways will ban you at once.

Pour conclure

If you're serious about building a robust and sustainable business online, platform diversification is a must.

Going all-in on anything is hardly necessary and rarely smart, so do it right from the start.

With thanks,
Jay