The payments maturity gap in e-commerce and marketplaces

Over the last few years, I’ve had the same conversation with e-commerce and marketplace leaders again and again.

The business is growing. New markets are launching. New sellers are onboarding. Volume is up, and ambition is high. But somewhere along the way, payments start to feel heavier than they should.

Not because teams made bad decisions, but because most payment stacks are the result of smart, pragmatic choices made under pressure. A payment service provider (PSP) is added to expand into a new country. A fraud tool is layered in to manage risk. A workaround to send payouts on time.

Individually, those decisions make sense. Collectively, they create a payments maturity gap.

Growth accelerates, but the payments stack doesn’t evolve at the same pace. And in 2026, that gap is widening.

Scaling faster than the payments stack

When I look at modern e-commerce and marketplace businesses, what stands out is how many dimensions they scale at once.

It’s not just more transactions. It’s more regions, more payment methods, more seller models, more regulatory requirements. And payments sit at the intersection of it all.

Most payments stacks, however, were never designed for this kind of multidimensional growth. They were built to process payments reliably, not to adapt continuously as the business changes.

Early on, a simple setup works. A single PSP or a small number of integrations gets the job done. But as soon as international expansion or marketplace flows enter the picture, limitations start to show.

I often hear teams say they feel like they’re spending more time managing payments than improving them. That’s usually the first signal that the stack hasn’t matured at the same speed as the business.

How fragmentation creeps into payment stacks

Fragmentation is rarely a strategy. It’s a side effect.

A new PSP is added to support local cards. Another comes in to reduce costs in a specific region. Fraud tooling is integrated separately because native coverage falls short for marketplace risk. Authentication logic lives somewhere else entirely.

Each component solves a real problem. Together, they create a system that’s hard to understand and even harder to change.

In practice, this shows up in very familiar ways:

• Routing logic that’s hard-coded and brittle
• Limited visibility into why transactions succeed or fail
• Manual reconciliation across PSP reports, seller payouts, and bank statements
• Slow experimentation because every change requires engineering work
• Growing dependency on individual providers

As complexity grows, execution slows. Launching a new market takes longer than planned. Testing a new payment method feels risky. Responding to regulatory change becomes reactive instead of deliberate.

Why scale no longer equals payment maturity

For a long time, payment maturity was loosely tied to size. More GMV, more countries, more providers often signaled sophistication.

I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Some of the largest e-commerce and marketplace businesses I speak with operate on surprisingly fragile payment foundations. At the same time, smaller teams with the right structure often have far more control.

Real payment maturity today is about one thing: control.

Mature teams can clearly answer questions like:

• Which provider performs best for a specific market or transaction type
• How authentication rules impact conversion across regions
• Where fraud controls protect revenue and where they add friction
• How quickly the stack can adapt when a provider underperforms or exits a market

If those answers live in spreadsheets, dashboards that don’t agree, or the heads of a few key people, the stack hasn’t truly matured yet.

Where control actually comes from

One misconception I see often is that control comes from adding more providers. In reality, control comes from structure.

When payment logic is tightly coupled to individual PSPs, every change is expensive. Teams hesitate to optimize because the cost of change is too high. Over time, that hesitation compounds into stagnation.

Structured setups work differently. Decision-making is centralized. Routing, retries, authentication rules, and data handling are defined independently of the providers executing them.

This shift has a real operational impact:

• Payments teams can test and iterate without rewriting integrations
• Finance teams get consistent data across providers and regions
• Risk teams can evolve fraud strategies without disrupting checkout
• Product teams move faster because payments stop being a bottleneck

In marketplaces, this structure is especially critical. Split payments, seller payouts, refunds, and chargebacks all depend on clean, predictable payment flows.

In more mature setups, teams decouple how customers pay from how sellers get paid, giving them the freedom to optimize acceptance, risk, and payout timing independently as the marketplace scales.

Fragmentation multiplies effort across every downstream process.

Why modular infrastructure matters

This is where modular payment infrastructure plays a key role. Modularity isn’t about architecture diagrams or technical purity. It’s about reducing operational drag while increasing flexibility. For ecommerce and marketplace teams, modular infrastructure means having a single operating layer that brings consistency across:

• Payment logic and routing decisions
• Sensitive data handling through tokenization
• Performance and cost visibility across providers
• Provider changes without disrupting the broader stack

The outcome is not abstraction for its own sake. It’s optionality.

When teams have the freedom to adapt without rebuilding, payments stop being a constraint and start supporting growth.

Closing the payment maturity gap

The payment maturity gap is closed by doing things differently, and teams that close it invest early in structure. They accept that payment complexity isn’t a temporary phase, but a permanent condition of scale.

Instead of reacting to each new requirement, they build systems designed to absorb change. Expansion becomes repeatable. Optimization becomes continuous. Dependency on any single provider decreases.

From where I sit, this is becoming one of the clearest differentiators between ecommerce and marketplace leaders in 2026.

Payments will always be complex. But with the right foundation, they don’t have to slow you down.