The Customer Experience Depends on Payment Orchestration

Merchants must juggle in-store sales with e-commerce and mobile shopping. There’s tech for that.

As e-commerce accelerates, many assume the retail future is fully digital. But 84.1% of total U.S. retail sales were made in-store during the first quarter of 2025, a reminder that brick-and-mortar isn’t going away.

With in-store interactions still central to the customer journey, retailers are modernizing the checkout experience with features like mobile-app payments and self-service kiosks to mirror the convenience of digital shopping.

While tech upgrades are essential for enabling seamless omnichannel experiences, they make processing and securing payments more complex. And if payment processing isn’t seamless and secure, it reintroduces the very friction these checkout enhancements were designed to eliminate.

As point-of-sale (POS) touchpoints multiply, centralized control over payment infrastructure becomes critical. Without a payments-orchestration strategy, retailers will struggle to manage diverse payment options while protecting consumer data.

Flexible Experiences

Here’s why payments orchestration is essential for omnichannel retail. The point of sale is no longer confined to one location or device. In a single store’s ecosystem, a customer might buy through a mobile app in the morning and make another purchase at a self-service kiosk that afternoon.

This places the onus on retailers to ensure that every transaction is processed securely and efficiently, regardless of the acceptance point. Each channel requires unique integration infrastructure with payment providers, acquirers, and various payment methods like credit cards and digital wallets, complicating transaction management.

The retail sector also faces heightened security risks. A recent breach compromised customer data from 4,000 online merchants due to vulnerabilities in their e-commerce software. To minimize breach exposure and maintain compliance, retailers must secure payment data and personally identifiable information (PII) at every endpoint, including access by third-party vendors and partners.

By implementing payments orchestration, retailers can confront these challenges head on. An orchestration layer unifies payment systems into a single platform, allowing businesses to seamlessly integrate multiple payment providers and methods.

Crucially, payments orchestration can also support tokenization, the process of replacing sensitive data with randomized tokens, rendering it useless to hackers if compromised.

Demand for flexible payment experiences will only increase as consumers continue to embrace new ways to browse and shop. To keep pace, retailers need a clear understanding of how to leverage payments orchestration for long-term control.

Key Benefits

Payments orchestration is retailers’ answer to the complexity of omnichannel payment environments. Orchestration solutions address common challenges, such as downtime and vendor sprawl, enabling  organizations to flexibly support new payment methods and enforce consistent security standards across channels.

With the right orchestration platform in place, merchants can achieve broad strategic gains and lay the groundwork for a future-ready payments infrastructure.

The right platform allows retailers to:

1. Flexibly move between payment processors

When retailers use multiple payment service providers (PSPs), internal teams often bear the burden of managing separate integrations. Not to mention, relying too heavily on any one provider can be costly if that provider experiences downtime and no fallback is in place.

Payments orchestration supports a multi-vendor strategy by acting as a centralized layer between a retailer’s front end and multiple PSPs. Rather than manage separate connections for each provider, retailers integrate once with the orchestration

layer, which translates and formats payment data to meet each processor’s requirements.

In turn, retailers can dynamically route transactions to the most suitable provider, avoiding a single point of failure and gaining control over performance and cost. For example, a merchant might route transactions to a backup processor during peak traffic periods to ensure customers can check out smoothly and sales aren’t lost.

Some orchestration tools may require formal certification with each back-end processor they support. However, by selecting a solution that translates payment data without certifying to the processors, retailers can deploy new connections on their own timeline, independent of the orchestrator’s existing certifications.

2. Enable tokenization and token ownership

As retailers prompt customers to save payment details for future purchases, they become responsible for securing payment data and other PII, such as email addresses and phone numbers often required during account creation.

Tokenization minimizes the risks of storing or transmitting this data by replacing sensitive information with randomized tokens that are useless if compromised. By selecting an orchestration provider that offers agnostic tokenization capabilities, merchants can switch processors without detokenizing and retokenizing customer data.

Likewise, providers that support a universal token encompassing payment data, PII and other shared information help retailers simplify token management and reduce risk when sharing tokens with third-party vendors and partners.

While payments orchestration streamlines tokenization across providers, maintaining token ownership is critical for portability and long-term flexibility.

3. Promote seamless customer identity across channels

Payments orchestration acts as a centralized layer for managing customer data across sales channels. Whether a customer purchases online, in-store, or via mobile, the orchestration platform creates a consistent, token-based identity that links activity across environments.

Imagine a customer buys a pair of shoes online and later shops in-store. If e-commerce and in-store systems use different payment processors, the customer may appear as two unrelated individuals in the company records.

However, an orchestration layer can create a universal token tied to the shopper’s card. When that customer returns to the store and uses the same credit card linked to their token, the retailer can recognize the online shoe purchase and apply loyalty points earned during the transaction at checkout, or look to upsell them on socks at the point-of-sale.

Beyond transaction efficiency, orchestration is a business intelligence play. Going forward, universal tokenization will create more opportunities for cross-channel marketing, and retailers that implement orchestration now will be poised to capitalize on unified customer data.

Future Proofing

Retail is moving toward integrated shopping experiences that give customers maximum choice in channel and payment method. Yet, no matter how polished the front-end experience becomes, omnichannel initiatives will fall short if the underlying payments stack can’t keep up.

Retailers that consider all facets of the customer data journey — from initial capture to secure storage and portability — will be prepared to navigate future shifts in compliance and customer expectations.

The value of payments orchestration comes down to control over which processors are used, how retailers route transactions, and how they adapt to changing demands. Beyond flexibility, orchestration reinforces the foundation of customer trust: protecting sensitive data.

—Ruston Miles is the founder of Bluefin.