Expanding into a new market is rarely a payments decision on paper. It starts as a commercial one: new customers, new revenue, a logical next step on the growth map. But the moment a merchant flips the switch, payments quietly decides how much of that opportunity actually converts. And the single most common mistake, according to PPRO's Chief Commercial Officer, Eelco Dettingmeijer, is treating a region as if it were a market.
It usually sounds reasonable. A team decides to "go into Europe," adds a couple of well-known methods, and assumes the continent is broadly covered. The problem is that Europe isn't a market. Neither is LATAM, and nor is most of Asia. They are collections of distinct local markets, each with its own dominant way of paying, and a regional checkout almost always leaves the most important option out.
When a familiar name still gets it wrong
The clearest illustration is one most people will recognise. When Netflix first entered the Netherlands, it launched without iDEAL; the bank-transfer method that Dutch consumers overwhelmingly prefer. iDEAL is not a nice-to-have in that market, it is the default. Today it accounts for the substantial majority of Dutch online transactions, having climbed steadily year on year[1]. Launching without it meant asking a huge proportion of customers to pay in a way they simply don't choose to.
Netflix, of course, went on to do rather well. But that's the point worth sitting with: even a category-defining business left growth on the table at launch, and could have accelerated faster by offering the locally relevant method from day one. If it can happen to Netflix, it can happen to anyone treating local payment preferences as a detail to fix later.
The compounding effect across markets
A single under-served market is survivable. The real danger is what happens when the same regional assumption is applied everywhere at once.
Picture a merchant operating across ten countries, each with a locally preferred method it hasn't enabled. In any one market, the shortfall might look tolerable, there are always cards, and a chunk of customers will pay with what's available. But stack that same gap across ten markets and the lost volume stops being a rounding error. It becomes a structural ceiling on international growth, invisible in any single P&L line yet very real in aggregate.
This is why the "we also accept cards" reassurance is so misleading. It's true, and in one or two markets you might get away with it. Across a genuinely international footprint, the inability to penetrate each market deeply compounds into a meaningful amount of revenue that never arrives, and, crucially, never shows up as a failure. Transactions that don't happen don't send a complaint.
Local, not regional, as the operating principle
The shift Dettingmeijer describes is from a regional view to a genuinely local one: understanding, market by market, how people actually prefer to pay, and treating that preference as a commercial priority rather than a technical afterthought. Encouragingly, the merchant side is catching up. The rise of large global retailers, including major Chinese players expanding internationally, has pushed local payment methods up the agenda, and many businesses are now far more aware than they were even a few years ago.
For enterprise merchants, the practical implication is straightforward. The question to ask before entering a market is not "do we accept cards there?" but "what do customers in this specific market expect to pay with, and have we enabled it?" Orchestration exists precisely to make that answer easy to act on, turning the regional mindset and its hidden costs into a local one that captures the volume a new market actually offers.
This article comes from APEXX Global's webinar with PPRO, "Critical Mistakes to Avoid in Your Payment Stack When Expanding into New International Markets," featuring Simon Hughes (CCO, APEXX) and Eelco Dettingmeijer (CCO, PPRO).
[1]: iDEAL is the dominant online payment method in the Netherlands, accounting for the large majority of e-commerce transactions and rising year on year (69% in Q3 2022 to 73% in Q3 2023). Source: Dutch Payments Association, Statista.
