From $199/mo
Large retailers have used payment orchestration for years: a layer above the processors that decides where each transaction goes, retries it somewhere else when it fails, and keeps one ledger across all of them. Shopify's closed checkout kept that out of reach for ordinary stores. This page explains what orchestration does, when it pays off, and how an own-domain checkout brings it to a store on any plan.
Enterprise platforms in this space serve airlines and marketplaces with dozens of processors. The mechanics are the same at two routes; the difference is who can afford the integration.
Orchestration needs to sit between the checkout and the processors. Shopify's checkout does not expose that seam: it captures the card itself and sends it to the single provider you activated. Payment customisation functions can hide or reorder methods, not route or retry. So the only place an orchestration layer can live for a Shopify store is on a checkout you control, connected back to Shopify through its APIs.
The checkout step runs on your subdomain. Behind it sit your gateway accounts, each as a route with its own credentials, health checks and priority. Each attempt is classified: a hard decline stops, a soft decline or timeout moves to the next route inside about 400 milliseconds. The card is tokenised once per session. Every capture, refund and chargeback flows into one ledger and one Shopify order, tagged with the route that took it.
Routing rules cover the cases a single store actually meets: send EU cards to the EU acquirer, keep high tickets on the acquirer with the best chargeback handling, put a crypto rail last for buyers with no working card. You set priorities from the dashboard; changing a route is configuration, not code. Multiple gateways with failover.
| Metric | What to watch |
|---|---|
| Approval rate by route | The reason to have two routes. Our merchants average an eighteen-point lift over a single-gateway baseline. |
| Recovered attempts | Declines on route one that captured on route two. This is revenue that did not exist before. |
| Rotation latency | Median time from first decline to second capture. Under half a second is invisible to the buyer. |
| Cost per approval | Fees divided by approved transactions. Routing cheap traffic to the cheap acquirer lowers it. |
| Chargeback ratio per route | Keeps each acquirer under its threshold instead of concentrating disputes on one. |
A store with one reliable processor, domestic buyers, a mainstream category and no history of terminations gets little from orchestration beyond insurance. If any of those is not true, the second route usually pays for itself on the first outage or the first tightening of a processor's policy.
A software layer that routes each payment to the best processor, retries failures on another one, holds card tokens across processors and reconciles everything in one ledger.
Not inside Shopify's own checkout. It works when the checkout step runs on an own-domain checkout that connects to several gateways and writes orders back into Shopify.
It is orchestration sized for a single store or a small group of stores: routing, cascading, tokens, health checks and one ledger, delivered as a hosted checkout.
No. The checkout runs outside Shopify, so it works on every plan.
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Payment gateway cascade → · Multiple gateways on Shopify → · How it works → · Pricing →
CascadeCheckout is checkout software, not a payment service provider, bank or merchant-account seller. You contract with your own gateway or acquirer, disclose your real business category to them, and receive payouts from them. We never hold funds and we do not promise that any processor will approve you.