A customer in São Paulo purchases an official FIFA World Cup hospitality package from your sports travel platform, while a fan in Tokyo buys a limited-edition World Cup jersey and memorabilia from the online merchandise store. Both expect a fast, frictionless checkout. If either payment fails, the sale is gone.
Major global sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup create concentrated bursts of cross-border commerce. Merchants, payment providers, hotels, and travel platforms suddenly find themselves serving customers from dozens of countries, each with their own currency, payment methods, and issuing banks.
The problem?
72% of merchants report higher payment failure rates for cross-border transactions compared to domestic ones.
In its Economic Impact Research, the World Travel & Tourism Council projected international visitor spending would reach a record US$2.1 trillion in 2025.
Major global sporting events tend to concentrate a portion of this cross-border spending into a short timeframe. Placing great pressure on payment systems to perform reliably at scale.
Global Customers Have Local Payment Preferences
Fans from around the world may be buying the same ticket or hospitality package, but they do not want to pay the same way.
Customers in the Netherlands expect to pay with iDEAL.
Buyers in Belgium often look for Bancontact.
Swiss fans commonly trust and use TWINT.
French shoppers prefer Cartes Bancaires.
In Brazil, Pix has become a dominant payment method for online purchases.
If these familiar and trusted payment options are not available, many customers may hesitate to complete their transaction. Especially when a competing merchant offers their preferred payment method.
This is why payment localization is important. The checkout experience should feel familiar to your customer from start to finish, regardless of where they are in the world. Merchants that can deliver this experience will be far better positioned to capture the surge in international demand generated by major global sporting events like the FIFA World Cup.
The Payment Impact of Peak Global Demand
Data released by Visa shows just how dramatically payment activity can increase during major sporting events. During the first weekend of the Paris 2024 Olympics:
Small businesses in Paris saw a 26% year-over-year increase in sales from Visa cardholders.
Spending on restaurants increased 36%, food and grocery 42%, and retail goods 21%.
International spending surged, with large increases from Japanese and Brazilian visitors.
Visa also reported that:
Paris attracted 42% more Visa cardholders than the same period a year earlier.
78% of international purchases were contactless, highlighting the scale of digital payment activity during the event.
Cross-Border Commerce Becomes the Norm
Major sporting events may amplify international demand, but the shift toward cross-border commerce is already underway.
Today’s customers expect to buy from merchants anywhere in the world as easily as they buy from local brands. According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the share of online shoppers making cross-border purchases increased from 20% in 2017 to 25% in 2019. And that trend has continued as global e-commerce expands.
For you, that means every checkout could involve a different currency, issuing bank, fraud profile, and payment method.
The merchants that succeed in this environment? They’ll be the ones who can orchestrate these complexities behind the scenes while delivering a seamless customer experience.
A modern payment orchestration layer can help, without forcing you to add operational overhead.
Customer Expectations Rise During Peak Moments
When demand is at its highest, every second of friction becomes more expensive.
A customer booking a World Cup travel package may be spending thousands of dollars. If their payment is declined or the checkout process stalls, they’re far more likely to abandon the purchase and book elsewhere. When large sums are involved, customers have little tolerance for payment issues and are understandably reluctant to risk a failed or delayed transaction.
According to the Baymard Institute, 18% of U.S. online shoppers have abandoned a purchase because the checkout process was too long or too complicated. During high-demand events, every extra step, every failed authorization increases the risk of losing the sale.
This is why peak demand is the ultimate stress test. The merchants that capture the most value are those that can keep payment performance high even as transaction volumes surge.
Fraud Evolves Alongside Opportunity
Every spike in demand attracts a second wave of traffic you never wanted.
Imagine a travel platform selling premium World Cup hospitality packages worth several thousand dollars. With transaction volumes surging overnight, so do:
Card-testing attacks
Account takeover attempts
Fraudulent purchases
Fraudsters target the high-traffic moments of peak demand, because they know merchants are under pressure to approve transactions quickly.
Account takeover attacks can turn trusted customer accounts into fraud vectors. A fraudster gains access to an existing account, updates payment or contact details, and purchases high-value tickets, travel packages, or merchandise. Because the account has a legitimate transaction history, these purchases can be difficult to distinguish from genuine customer activity.
Card-testing bots can generate thousands of low-value authorization attempts in minutes. Fraudsters use stolen card details to identify which cards are still active, before using them for larger purchases elsewhere. The resulting spike in authorization traffic can strain payment infrastructure and increase processing costs.
Friendly fraud and chargebacks can create losses long after the event ends. A customer attends the event, receives the service, and then disputes the transaction with their bank. The merchant loses the revenue, pays chargeback fees, and must dedicate resources to gathering evidence and contesting the claim.
The challenge is maintaining strong fraud controls without creating checkout friction. Because declining legitimate customers can be just as costly as approving fraudulent ones.
Payment Resilience Matters More Than Ever
Picture this: ticket sales open for a major tournament, traffic surges, and your primary payment provider starts timing out. Every failed authorization is a customer heading to a competitor.
Global events compress months of transaction volume into days. In those moments, payment resilience becomes a revenue protection strategy.
With an orchestrator like IXOPAY, you can build redundancy into your payment stack instead of relying on a single provider:
Route transactions dynamically to the best-performing acquirer based on geography, payment method, risk profile, or historical performance.
Automatically fail over to a backup provider when outages or declines occur, helping you recover transactions that would otherwise be lost.
Distribute transaction volume across multiple providers with load balancing to prevent bottlenecks during demand spikes.
Connect to 200+ payment providers and 300+ payment methods through a single integration, reducing operational complexity while expanding global coverage.
When every approval matters, resilience can help you keep revenue flowing. Even if a payment provider, gateway connection, or processing endpoint fails.
The Growing Importance of Payment Flexibility
The payment landscape can change fast. A payment method that dominates one market today may be joined by new local alternatives tomorrow. When international demand surges during events like the World Cup, you cannot afford a six-month development project every time a transaction comes from a new market.
Imagine demand for your merchandise spikes in Brazil, but you don’t support Pix. Or sales take off in Belgium, yet Bancontact isn’t available at checkout. Those revenue opportunities will disappear long before your integration roadmap catches up.
With IXOPAY, you can adapt quickly:
Add new payment providers and payment methods through a single orchestration layer instead of building custom integrations.
Expand into new markets without overhauling your payment infrastructure.
Test, optimize, and switch providers as performance, costs, and customer preferences evolve.
Avoid provider lock-in by switching providers and routing transactions freely through a single payment stack.
Access 300+ payment methods and 200+ providers through one platform.
When global demand shifts overnight, flexibility will help you capture new revenue opportunities without creating additional complexity for your teams.
Lessons Merchants Can Take Beyond the Tournament
The World Cup is unusual in scale, but the payment challenges it exposes exist year-round.
Take authorization rates. A payment that is approved in one market may be declined in another because issuers, risk models, and payment networks behave differently across regions. If you’re expanding internationally, improving authorization rates by even a few percentage points could translate into millions in additional revenue, without acquiring a single new customer.
The same applies to payment data. A customer paying with Pix, iDEAL, or a credit card generates different signals. Merchants that can centralize payment data across providers through a payment orchestration layer gain a unified view of authorization rates, fraud outcomes, chargebacks, and provider performance, making it easier to identify revenue leakage and optimize payment flows.
The World Cup also highlights the value of agility. New payment methods can reach mass adoption surprisingly quick. Just four years after its launch, Pix processed more than 63 billion transactions in Brazil during 2024 alone. Merchants that can add emerging payment methods without lengthy development cycles will be better positioned to capitalize on shifts in customer behavior.
Ultimately, payment strategy is becoming a competitive advantage. The merchants best equipped for global growth are those that can localize customer experience and adapt quickly as markets evolve.
Turn Payment Complexity into Competitive Advantage
When millions of customers arrive from dozens of markets at once, weaknesses in your payment stack become impossible to ignore. To stay competitive, you must:
Deliver localized checkout experiences across markets and payment methods.
Improve authorization rates and recover revenue that would otherwise be lost to declines.
Strengthen fraud defenses without adding friction for legitimate customers.
Build resilience through intelligent routing and provider redundancy.
Expand into new markets without adding integration complexity.
IXOPAY can give you the orchestration layer to manage these challenges through a single platform.
Ready to optimize your payment strategy for global growth? Request a demo now.
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