About the author

My background

I've worked in payments for more than 12 years, mainly on the merchant side.

My work has covered PSP selection and RFPs, payment integrations, product and project leadership, payment architecture, operations, and strategy. The common thread has always been the same: making payments work better for the merchant.

I've been the person choosing a PSP, managing the implementation, dealing with payment issues after launch, and looking at the numbers to understand where money or conversion is being lost.

Why I built Payment Checkout

Throughout my career, I often wished there was a simple way to actually see and test a PSP's checkout before choosing it.

As a payments lead, I was usually dependent on software engineers to build the checkout. That often happened months into a project, long after the PSP had already been selected and the contract signed.

Most RFPs involved comparing providers based on presentations, documentation, demos and commercial proposals, without ever getting hands-on with the actual product.

It's a bit like buying a T-shirt you've never seen.

So I built Payment Checkout to give merchants a different way to evaluate payment providers.

The site lets you explore real PSP checkout components in their test environments and change the configuration yourself. No full integration project, no lengthy setup, and no need to write code just to see how the checkout behaves.

The goal is simple: see it, test it, and understand it before you buy it.

There is also a bigger idea behind it.

PSPs build products for merchants, but the people buying those products often experience them very differently from the people building them. I've spent years on the merchant side of that relationship, and I want to bring that perspective into the products I build.

What I'm building next

I'm currently building a productized payment operations service on a subscription basis.

The idea is simple: give mid-sized businesses access to an experienced payments team without the cost or commitment of building a full internal payments function.

Many companies reach a point where payments become too important to manage as a side task, but are not yet large enough to build a dedicated team.

That's the gap I'm interested in.

A fractional payments team that can help with PSP management, payment performance, optimisation, operations and the day-to-day problems that come with running payments at scale.

I've seen what a dedicated payments organisation can achieve in a large company. At one of the merchants I worked with, for example, the payments organisation was more than 800 people strong.

Most mid-sized merchants don't have anyone to close that gap.

The service is called paymentops, and what it offers is interim payment operations. It is open and taking clients, and you can find what it covers on eliejoseph.com.

Say hello

If you've found something useful here, want to compare notes on payments, have feedback on the playgrounds, or simply want to talk about payments, feel free to reach out.

I'm always happy to connect with people working in the payments space.

No sales pitch required.