Shopify stays your source of truth. We move the checkout step off Shopify Payments and route it through the gateways you bring. If one route dies mid-checkout, the cascade picks the next one — under 400ms — so the buyer never sees a decline. Orders still land in your Shopify admin tagged [cascade] so fulfillment, apps and reports keep working like nothing changed.
CascadeCheckout is middleware. Not a payment processor. Not a bank. Not a merchant of record. We do not underwrite MIDs, we do not hold funds, and we do not touch card data. What we do is stand up a checkout page on your own domain, wire it to your own gateway accounts, and route every transaction through a live decision layer that picks the healthiest MID on each attempt.
The merchant of record stays the merchant. Their MID, their contract with the acquirer, their payouts. We are the software connection between Shopify and the gateways they choose to plug in.
Why this exists. Shopify's built-in checkout only accepts a short list of gateways (Shopify Payments plus a handful of approved third parties). If you are in a category Shopify Payments does not want — kratom, delta-8, CBD, nutra, peptides, vape, adult, IPTV, forex signals, gambling — you get locked out of half the internet's default payment rails. CascadeCheckout removes that lock without asking you to rebuild your store.
Send us the API keys for the gateways you want to use. Stripe, Mollie, NMI, Nuvei, Adyen, Airwallex, Checkout.com, PXP, Whop, Coinbase Commerce, MyFatoorah, custom HTTP — almost anything with an API.
You keep the MID under your own contract. We never see the funds. Payouts hit your bank on the gateway's normal schedule.
We stand up a checkout page on a subdomain of your brand — checkout.your-brand.com — with TLS, PCI-compliant tokenization, mobile-first UX and up to seven locales. Native Shopify express buttons (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay) are suppressed so buyers land in the cascade instead of a wallet redirect.
Every attempt is scored against decline signals, 3DS failures, velocity blocks and MCC restrictions. If the primary MID returns a decline or times out, the next healthy MID captures inside 400ms. The order still writes back to Shopify tagged [cascade]. Fulfillment, apps and reports keep working.
A single-gateway checkout is a single point of failure. When Shopify Payments freezes an account, or Stripe reserves a payout, or an offshore MID starts throttling above a chargeback threshold, revenue stops the same day. Cascading across two, three, four MIDs turns that from an outage into a routing decision. The buyer's tab does not reload. The button does not turn red. Their card goes through on the next processor in the stack. You see the tag in Shopify admin — [cascade:route-2] — and you know which MID caught the sale.
Live in 24-48 hours. Founder-answered support.
No. Payouts settle from your gateway to your bank on the gateway's normal schedule. We are middleware, not a PSP.
Almost any with an API — Stripe, Mollie, Adyen, NMI, Nuvei, Airwallex, Checkout.com, PXP, Whop, Coinbase Commerce, Trustly, MyFatoorah, custom HTTP.
No. They pay on your branded subdomain. Looks like any modern checkout. The Shopify order lands normally in your admin.
That is the cascade — the next healthy MID captures inside 400ms. Buyer sees no decline. You switch MIDs from the ops dashboard.
Yes, tagged [cascade]. Refund, fulfill and reports keep working normally.
CascadeCheckout