Payment Orchestration Layer: Why You Should Abstract Your Gateways

Pre-seed founders often hardcode a single gateway (e.g. Stripe). That creates vendor lock-in and makes it hard to add regional providers, failover, or better rates. An orchestration layer abstracts gateways behind a single API and centralizes routing, retries, and webhook handling.

Multi-gateway strategy

Expose one payment API to your product. Internally, the orchestrator selects a gateway by routing rules (region, amount, currency, tenant). Each gateway is an adapter that normalizes requests and responses to a common shape.

Webhook normalization

Gateways send different payloads and signatures. The orchestrator receives webhooks, verifies signatures, maps to a canonical event type, and publishes internally. Downstream systems (ledger, notifications) consume one event stream instead of N gateway-specific ones.

Provider failover

On gateway timeout or error, the orchestrator can retry with the same idempotency key or route to a fallback gateway if your design allows. Failover must not create duplicate charges—use the same idempotency key across gateways for the same logical payment.

Routing logic

Route by tenant config, currency, amount band, or region. Keep routing in config or a small rules engine, not hardcoded. Log routing decisions for audit and debugging.

Vendor lock-in risks

Without an abstraction layer, product code is full of gateway-specific calls and types. Switching or adding a provider becomes a rewrite. An orchestrator keeps gateway logic in one place and lets you add or replace providers without touching product code.