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The LILPE Blog

Payments, compliance, and merchant onboarding — explained by the team building LILPE's payment orchestration platform.

Duplicate Payments: Why Customers Get Charged Twice and How to Prevent It

A customer pays once and is charged twice. It's rarely a provider fault: it's a double tap, a timeout followed by a blind retry, or two providers that both said yes. Where duplicates come from, the four layers that stop them (including idempotency keys done properly), and what to do when one slips through.

By LILPE Editorial Team · 9 October 2026Read Article

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Engineering

Payment API Timeouts: What to Do When You Don't Know If a Payment Went Through

A timeout doesn't mean a payment failed. It means you don't know. How timeouts differ from declines and pending payments, what a timeout can and can't tell you, how to set a timeout budget, which errors are safe to retry, and a status-check routine that resolves unknown payments without charging anyone twice.

9 October 2026 · 9 min read

Cover for a guide to measuring payment success rate correctly

Platform

Payment Success Rate: How to Measure It Without Fooling Yourself

Payment success rate is the number every payments team quotes and few define the same way. Attempt-level or order-level, what goes in the denominator, how retries, pending payments and customer drop-offs distort it, the breakdowns that actually explain a drop, and how to turn it into alerts that fire for the right reasons.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Cover for an incident runbook for merchants whose payment gateway is down

Platform

Payment Gateway Down? An Incident Runbook for the First Hour and After

When payments start failing, the first hour decides how much it costs. How to tell a provider outage from your own fault, the decisions to make in the first twenty minutes, how to avoid creating duplicates and unpaid orders while it lasts, what to tell customers, and the clean-up that makes sure no payment is lost afterwards.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Cover for a checklist on preparing payments for sale days and peak traffic

Engineering

Payments on Sale Day: Rate Limits, Load Tests and Fallbacks Before Peak Traffic

A festive sale, a product drop or a ticket launch puts the most pressure on the step that earns the money: payment. What actually breaks under peak load, how provider rate limits work and how to stay inside them, how to load test without hammering a provider, a capacity estimate you can do on paper, and a week-by-week readiness checklist.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Engineering

Payment API Versioning: Changing an API Without Breaking Integrations

Payment integrations live for years, and a change that breaks one stops money moving. What counts as a breaking change in a payments API (including the ones that look harmless), versioning strategies and their trade-offs, how to deprecate properly, and how to integrate with providers' APIs so their changes don't break you.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Cover for a reference architecture of a payment orchestration layer and its components

Platform

Payment Orchestration Architecture: The Components and How a Payment Flows Through Them

A vendor-neutral reference architecture for a payment orchestration layer: the unified API and data model, routing engine, provider connectors, token vault, retry controller, webhook normalisation, reconciliation and observability. What each component does, how a payment moves through them, and the design principles that keep the whole thing correct.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Platform

Evaluating a Payment Orchestration Platform: The Questions to Ask Before You Sign

A payment orchestration platform sits in the path of every payment you take, so choosing one deserves more than a feature checklist. The questions that separate substance from slides across providers, routing, retries, API design, security and regulation, reliability, reconciliation, pricing and exit, plus how to test the answers before you sign.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Payments

Switching Payment Gateways: A Migration Plan That Doesn't Lose Payments

Moving to a new payment gateway is mostly easy for one-off checkout payments and mostly hard for everything attached to the old one: saved cards, recurring mandates, refunds on past payments, printed QR codes, virtual accounts and reconciliation. An inventory of what has to move, a phased plan with a parallel run, and the tail you'll need to keep the old account open for.

9 October 2026 · 7 min read

Engineering

Double-Entry Ledgers for Payments: Designing the Books Behind Your Money Flows

Once your product holds or moves money for other people, a status column isn't enough: you need a ledger. Double-entry bookkeeping explained for engineers, the accounts a payments business usually needs, a worked marketplace example from payment to payout, a schema that enforces balanced entries, and the rules that keep a ledger trustworthy.

9 October 2026 · 8 min read

Showing 1–9 of 85 articles

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