Solidgate Chooses Testlio for In-Market Payment Testing to Perfect Checkouts

Company overview

Solidgate is a modern payment orchestration platform designed to turn payments into a growth driver rather than a bottleneck. Through a single integration, it helps global companies cut processing costs, boost approval rates, reduce fraud, and expand into new markets with ease. By connecting businesses to leading acquirers and a wide range of local and alternative payment methods across both developed and emerging regions, Solidgate enables seamless global scaling. Its intelligent routing, built-in fraud and chargeback prevention, and tax compliance capabilities work behind the scenes to maximize revenue and simplify operations so companies can focus on growth instead of payments complexity.

Focused on high-growth digital businesses, Solidgate stands out for its performance-driven infrastructure, global reach, and ability to optimize payments to increase approval rates and revenue.

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Challenge

Solidgate faced several challenges in ensuring that its embedded payment solutions performed consistently and intuitively across diverse markets, payment methods, and user expectations. In global payments, even small, market-specific issues can quietly erode revenue, distort performance data, and damage client trust.

While Solidgate’s clients required localized payment options to be seamlessly integrated into their checkout flows, validating these experiences at scale introduced several high-stakes challenges:

Need for in-market validation

Payment preferences and user behaviors vary significantly by country. More importantly, so do the failure modes. Without true in-market validation, Solidgate risked missing subtle but high-impact issues such as payments failing at a specific step in the flow, delays or mismatches reflected from a selected payment method, or even “silent” cart abandonment issues where users drop off without triggering an explicit error.

To address this, Solidgate needed access to testers who were registered with very specific Alternative Payment Methods (APM) to execute transactions locally. This would allow them to verify technical success and confirm that the experience matched regional expectations. Example APMs they were looking to test for included:

• Alipay and WeChat Pay in China 
• GCash in Philippines
• MB WAY in Portugal
• Pix in Brazil 
• Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India
• And many more 

Balancing usability insights with structured functional testing

Real risks sat in the gap between qualitative feedback and functional QA, as neither alone was sufficient. Without connecting user perception to actual transaction outcomes, Solidgate could miss optimization opportunities such as APM-specific friction, unclear payment states, or misaligned UX patterns that reduce conversion even when flows are technically successful.

They needed a scalable approach that could surface not only why users hesitated or dropped off, but also where flows broke down, without relying on time-intensive usability methods like long-form surveys or questionnaires that did not fit their workflows.

Client-facing expectations

Solidgate’s clients depended on them not just for payment infrastructure, but for confidence that payments would perform and convert in each target market. Missing market-specific issues before launch could lead to lost revenue, misattributed declines, or unnecessary routing and APM optimization efforts based on incomplete data.

To meet these expectations, Solidgate needed a way to validate and clearly communicate both functional performance and user confidence, even before pilot clients began processing transactions. It sought a solution that could battle test payment methods ahead of launch, so the team could identify and resolve issues before they reach real checkout environments. The desired approach had to surface optimization opportunities that only emerge through in-market scenarios, such as APM specific latency, authentication friction, or inconsistencies in how payment confirmations are displayed, ensuring a smoother experience from day one.

Solution

Solidgate began working with Testlio in 2025 to validate its payment solutions in new markets, particularly across Asia and Latin America, where the risk of undetected payment failures and conversion gaps was highest. The goal was not just to confirm that payments technically worked, but to ensure that real users in each market could successfully complete transactions without friction, confusion, or silent drop-off.

To address the need for true in-market validation, Testlio provided access to testers based in specific countries who were already set up with local Alternative Payment Methods (APMs). These testers executed real transactions using methods such as the UPI, region-specific wallets, and local bank transfer systems. This made it possible to validate critical moments in the payment flow that could not be completed in staging environments, including payment method selection, authentication steps, processing delays, and confirmation states.

The engagement followed a co-managed model that allowed Solidgate to maintain control over test design while leveraging Testlio’s global testing community and operational support. Solidgate defined test cases, scenarios, and success criteria, focusing on both functional coverage and known risk areas such as payment initiation, redirects, authorization flows, and post-payment confirmation. Testlio supported execution by providing a dedicated test lead and coordinating in-market testers to run these scenarios consistently across regions.

From a technical and use case perspective, testing focused on a range of real-world payment scenarios, including:

• Successful end-to-end transactions across different APMs
• Failure scenarios such as insufficient funds, authentication errors, or user drop-off mid-flow
• Refund testing to validate a critical part of the payment lifecycle and ensure smooth post-transaction experiences
• UI and UX validation, including whether the selected payment method was clearly reflected and whether users understood the next steps
• Redirect and callback handling, especially for APMs that require external authorization flows
• Latency and timing issues that could impact user trust or cause abandonment
• Payment confirmation accuracy, ensuring users receive clear and timely feedback after completing a transaction

To keep the process efficient and scalable, Testlio implemented a lightweight execution model. Testers were provided with a single payment link or, in some cases, guided through transactions directly on client websites, allowing validation of the full payment flow in a real integration environment. This approach reduces setup complexity while ensuring correctness, compliance, and a frictionless UI and UX on the client’s end.

Each test followed a defined scenario and produced structured pass or fail results, supported by video recordings that captured the full user journey. This gave Solidgate clear visibility into where and why failures or friction occurred, whether it was technical or experience-related, and provided clients greater confidence in operating and scaling across different markets.

By combining targeted test cases, real payment execution, and clear evidence through video, the approach gave Solidgate both the functional validation and the behavioral insight needed to confidently optimize payment flows for each market. In addition, feedback from local testers on how familiar and intuitive the payment flows feel provides an extra layer of validation, helping ensure each experience aligns with user expectations in specific regions.

Results

During the proof-of-concept phase, Testlio supported Solidgate with more than 350 live payment tests across six markets, giving them early visibility into how their payment flows performed under real user conditions. This directly addressed the risk of undetected failures and silent conversion loss in new regions. As a result, Solidgate was able to launch without delays while identifying and localizing over 95% of potential production issues before they reached clients. This level of validation allowed them to confidently pilot new payment methods in complex and emerging markets, knowing that both functionality and user experience had been verified in-market.

The partnership also proved critical in uncovering high-impact issues that would have been difficult to detect in non-local or simulated environments. In one case, a technical issue on the client’s side caused a product to be delivered before the payment was actually confirmed. Because this issue surfaced during a live, in-market payment test, Solidgate was able to quickly contain it before it led to financial loss or erosion of client trust. This reinforced the importance of validating not just payment success states, but the full transaction lifecycle in real conditions.

Most importantly, the combined functional validation and in-market user insight translated into measurable improvements for Solidgate’s clients. By identifying friction points such as unclear payment states, delayed confirmations, or mismatches in user expectations, Solidgate optimized checkout flows to reduce abandonment and increase conversion confidence. Clients benefited from more reliable payment experiences, fewer failed or misattributed transactions, and smoother market entry when rolling out new payment methods.

This impact extended beyond individual fixes. Solidgate gained a repeatable, scalable way to validate payment performance and user trust across regions, enabling faster iteration and more informed optimization decisions. The flexibility of the co-managed model allowed them to continuously refine their approach while maintaining control, ultimately strengthening their ability to deliver high-performing, localized payment experiences at scale.

"Working with Testlio allowed us to catch critical issues we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The feedback from in-market testers gave us confidence that our payment flows work as expected, and we could address problems before they reached our customers."

Stefan Dzhenkov, Head of Alternative and Local Payments, Solidgate