Routing overview
Routing allows you to manage payments orchestration routing and process transactions based on configured criteria from within Modernized Zuora Payments.
This feature is available only with the Modernized Zuora Payments add-on SKU.
To access the Early Adopter program, contact your Zuora account representative.
Routing is a payment orchestration capability that helps you decide how to process a transaction based on business and performance criteria. Instead of sending all transactions through a single provider, you can define conditions that determine which provider handles a payment, how to distribute traffic, and what happens when a transaction is declined or returns an error.
You can use Routing to perform the following tasks:
- Increase approval rates.
- Reduce payment processing costs.
- Direct traffic based on attributes such as payment method, amount, currency, or payment origin.
- Create fallback paths for declined or failed transactions.
- Distribute traffic across multiple providers.
In the Routing section, payment methods are grouped by whether they have a published route. You can create a route for a payment method, publish it, and update it as your payment strategy changes.
A published route defines how a payment method is processed after your customer selects it in checkout. Checkout controls the customer-facing display experience, but Routing controls how the payment is processed behind the scenes. Because of this relationship, a payment method must have a published route before you can make it available in Checkout.
Payment and refund processing
Routing supports payment processing flows that are more flexible than a single fixed provider path. A route consists of conditions and processing steps.
A condition defines when to apply a route path. For example, you can create conditions based on the transaction amount, currency, country, payment method, or payment origin. The available condition types depend on the payment method that you are configuring.
Within each condition, you add one or more provider connections. Each provider connection becomes a step in the route. You can then define what happens for the following transaction outcomes:
- Succeeded
- Declined
- Error
With this model, you can build a complete payment processing flow. For example, you can send a transaction to one provider first, move it to another provider if the transaction is declined, and define a different path if the first provider returns an error.
You can also distribute traffic across multiple providers to compare performance, support regional processing needs, or avoid concentrating all traffic on one provider.
Refund processing depends on your provider setup and payment flow design. When you build routing rules for payments, consider the full transaction lifecycle so that payment handling, retry strategy, and refund behavior remain aligned.
Smart Routing
Smart Routing is a routing option that automatically allocates transactions across multiple eligible providers based on the optimization goal that you select.
Use Smart Routing when you do not want to rely only on static routing logic or manual traffic distribution. Instead of defining an exact percentage split, Zuora evaluates the available providers and sends each transaction through the most suitable path.
Smart Routing supports the following optimization modes:
- Conversion rate and latency: Make intelligent decisions to optimize processing time while achieving the highest conversion rate.
- Conversion rate and cost: Make smart decisions to optimize costs while achieving the highest conversion rate. Input the costs associated with each provider through the "Connections" section. Note: If you optimize for cost, ensure that you have configured provider costs in the Connections area. Smart Routing uses that configuration when making routing decisions.
If you need exact control over traffic allocation, use manual distribution instead of Smart Routing and set the percentage of transactions to send through each connection.