What makes switching providers frightening is not the rate or the paperwork — it is one question: what happens to sales on the day you flip over. The answer depends entirely on the order of operations. Terminate first and look for a replacement afterwards, and downtime is guaranteed. Bring the new provider up alongside the old one, and the customer never notices the change, while you get a week of comparing approval rates and payouts on real money.
When it is time to switch
- The rate is above market for your vertical. Even one percentage point on 50,000 EUR a month is 6,000 EUR a year that buys you nothing.
- A low approval rate. Every declined card is a paid click that never became a sale. The gap in approval between providers is usually wider than the gap in commission.
- Payouts arrive unpredictably. The contract says one settlement period; in practice it is “review”, “clarification”, “risk department”.
- A reserve with no terms in the contract. The percentage held and the release period have to be written as numbers. Without them you have no idea how much money is locked up or when it comes back.
- Suspensions without warning. Acceptance is switched off, the explanation arrives a week later, and sales stand still in between.
- Support answers in templates. In a disputed transaction or a chargeback spike, the cost of the question is measured in hours, not in days in a general queue.
The classic mistake: terminate first, search later
Once you terminate, your negotiating position disappears. You are no longer an active client who might leave — you are a former one, with a reserve in limbo and no access to exports. Meanwhile the new provider asks for 6–12 months of processing history, and there is nowhere left to get it. The correct order is the reverse: a working second channel first, termination last.
Parallel rollout, step by step
- Integration and tests. The new provider comes up on test keys while the old one still carries all live traffic. Integration is a plugin for WordPress or OpenCart, or a direct API connection; a payment link is enough for a quick start.
- A small slice of traffic. Route part of the payments to the new provider — one payment method, say, or one country. Watch the approval rate, the response time and how 3-D Secure behaves on real cards.
- Compare on your own numbers. A week is enough to see what matters: share of successful payments, average confirmation speed, and when money actually lands on the account.
- Move the main volume. Keep the old channel switched on as a backup — that is cheaper than any downtime.
- Terminate. Only after the reserve and the exports are in your hands.
What is hardest to move
- Subscriptions and recurring charges. There is no single button for them: waiting out renewals on the old provider is not an option, and asking customers for their card again costs you part of the base. What works is migrating stored cards and starting new charges on the new channel, leaving the old one only the cycles already in flight.
- Stored cards. Card data sits with the provider in protected form and moves between providers through an established procedure, not as a file export. Request it early: this is the one part of the migration that cannot be done in a day.
- Payment links and buttons. Every place a link is embedded — emails, invoices, messengers, old pages. Reissuing them is easier than hunting them down one by one later.
- Settlement details. If the account is changing too, change it first and the provider second, or the very first payout goes nowhere.
What to collect before terminating
- The reserve: the exact amount, the release date and the details it will be sent to.
- A full export of transactions — the new provider and your accountants will both want it.
- The chargeback and refund register with dates and dispute outcomes.
- A turnover statement: volume, refund rate and dispute rate by month.
- Stored cards — start the transfer procedure before termination; afterwards the request will not be accepted.
Terms you can see before signing
So there is something to compare against: a rate of 3 %–5 % depending on the vertical, 0.50 EUR per transaction, settlement in euro via SEPA at 0.20 % on T+7, a rolling reserve of 10 % for 180 days, 50 EUR per refund, 100 EUR per chargeback, limits of 10–2,500 EUR per transaction, 200,000 EUR per day and 2,000,000 EUR per month. For a specific profile the terms are calculated individually.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to pause payments during the switch
No. With a parallel rollout the old channel keeps working while the new one takes on traffic. The only people who have to pause are those who terminated first.
Can I keep two providers permanently
Yes, and for many merchants it is a deliberate choice: one channel is one point of failure. Traffic is split by rules, and if one side fails the payments go to the other.
What happens to open disputes on old payments
They stay with the provider that processed the transaction until the dispute closes. That is why you need access to their portal for a while after the migration.
How long does onboarding take
Timelines are individual: they depend on the document pack and the complexity of the vertical. The technical side is rarely the bottleneck — the paperwork is.
The technical side is covered under payment processing, boarding itself is arranged as a merchant account, and settlement runs through a business IBAN.