Primer
Primer is an orchestration layer, not a processor. It sits above the payment providers you already hold, decides which one each charge goes to, and can send a decline to a second one instead of ending the purchase. Connect it and funnel checkouts run through the routing you configured in Primer, while the money still settles wherever it settled before.
Primer
Route each charge across the processors you already have
Takes payments
Why connect Primer
The argument, not the feature list.
You are not locked to one acquirer
Primer keeps its own vault, so the card that bought today is not stranded with the processor that happened to take it. Adding, swapping or splitting traffic between providers is a routing change on Primer’s side rather than a re-integration on yours.
A decline gets a second attempt somewhere else
A fallback route sends a refused charge to another processor. On a subscription business that is the difference between a renewal lost to one acquirer’s risk rules and a renewal that simply went through elsewhere.
The routing is configuration, not a release
Primer’s rules live in Primer. Change where charges go, and the funnel does not change at all — no new deployment, no edit to your pages.
Your processors, your settlement
Primer is not a merchant of record and does not hold your money. Whoever it routed to settles exactly as they did before, so this is added control rather than a new party between you and your revenue.
How it works
What moves, and in which direction.
- 01Connect your Primer account from store settings.
- 02Primer’s checkout mounts in your page — it is headless, so the payment UI lives in your own chrome rather than on a page of Primer’s.
- 03Each charge follows the workflow you configured in Primer, which picks a processor and can cascade to another on a decline.
- 04Payment updates flow back for renewals, refunds and disputes.
- 05Purchases fan out to your other connected integrations as events.
What gets sent
Primer is where the charge happens rather than a destination we forward events to. Completed purchases fan out to your other connected integrations.
Worth knowing
Things that will otherwise surprise you later.
- Primer routes; it does not acquire. Orchestration sits above your payment providers and does not replace the need for one.
- Because the saved card lives with whichever processor Primer routed to, a one-click upsell after the purchase can decline where a single-processor setup would not. Author an on-session fallback for it.
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Connect Primer in a couple of minutes
Set it up in the dashboard — no engineering ticket, no deploy.