Nine in ten (92 per cent) enterprise e-commerce merchants have experienced payment outages or disruption within the past two years, according to new independent research from payment orchestration provider BR-DGE.
The study, which surveyed 50 decision-makers at enterprise e-commerce merchants across retail, travel, and digital services, exposes significant resilience gaps in the payments ecosystem. Half of the merchants surveyed stated that these payment failures cost them between £1.1million and £10million in lost revenue.
The research also found that payment limitations are actively holding back growth, with 54 per cent of merchants revealing that payment issues have delayed or prevented their entry into new markets.
In response to the findings, BR-DGE has launched the ‘Payments Resilience Playbook’, a hands-on guide to help enterprise e-commerce teams strengthen their payment infrastructure.
Resilience gaps and concentration risk
The research highlights that checkout failures go beyond outages and are often caused by a failure to provide the right customer experience. This has moved payment resilience from a back-office concern to a boardroom-level agenda.
Key findings from the study reveal a high level of concentration risk, with 71 per cent of enterprise merchants routing most of their transaction volume through a single primary provider, increasing their exposure during an incident.
When outages do occur, the majority of merchants are unprepared for a quick recovery. The study found that 68 per cent of merchants rely on manual fixes to re-route payments, with only 32 per cent having automated backup routes in place.
Barriers to improvement also remain high. Despite 78 per cent of merchants using tokenisation, only 12 per cent have a fully interoperable, independent token vault. Furthermore, 44 per cent of merchants cited technical integration as the single biggest obstacle to improving their payment resilience.
Resilience as a growth strategy
BR-DGE argues that merchants are increasingly viewing payment resilience not just as a safety net, but as a core growth strategy.
Thomas Gillan, chief executive officer at BR-DGE, said: “When payments fail, customers don’t wait, they drop their baskets, switch providers and often don’t return. Even short outages can mean millions in lost revenue and lasting damage to customer trust – and that’s before you add other payments issues into the mix. Yet too many merchants still see resilience as a safety net rather than a growth strategy.
“Our research shows that building a flexible, interoperable payment infrastructure is essential not only to avoiding outages; to keep customers, protect revenue and open new markets.”
The new ‘Payments Resilience Playbook’ launched by BR-DGE aims to provide a practical guide for merchants to address these gaps. It is built around real-world merchant setups and outlines five key building blocks of modern payment resilience: redundancy, flexibility, interoperability, optimisation, and future-readiness.
