Checkout Sentinel: Real-Time Gateway Orchestrator & Fallback
10/10
Demand Score
Every minute of checkout failure burns revenue and ad spend; peak events (drops, holidays) amplify losses and support load.
8/10
Blue Ocean
Competition Level
$500-3k
Price/Month
Predicted customer spend
12 days
Time to MVP
Difficulty: Hard
The Problem
A payment reliability layer that continuously runs synthetic checkouts per region and PSP to detect 3DS/gateway degradations, then routes each live transaction to the healthiest path in real time. Use
🔗 Validated by Real User Complaints
This problem has been verified through 2 real user complaints:
Competitor Landscape
- Spreedly
- Primer
- Paydock
- Gr4vy
- Checkout.com Intelligent Routing
Must-Have Features for MVP
Regional synthetic transaction probes with PSP/3DS health scoring
Rules engine for multi-gateway routing and retries
PCI token vault and network tokenization support
Cart Freeze + resumable secure payment links
Smart fallback (alternate payment methods, later capture)
Incident alerts, drill-down analytics, and reason codes
A/B testing of routing strategies
Webhooks and BI export for auth-rate KPIs
⚠️ Potential Challenges
- PCI scope and tokenization strategy
- PSP contracts and routing rules per market
- SCA/3DS policy differences by region
- Checkout extension limits on specific platforms
Risk Level: High
🎯 Keys to Success
- Proven increase in auth and conversion rates
- No added friction for shoppers
- Rapid install via checkout extensions
- Clear incident ROI reports (revenue saved)
- Vendor-agnostic routing to avoid PSP lock-in
Ready to Build This?
This hard-difficulty project could be your next micro-SaaS success.