You chose a payment provider for good reasons. It settles in your currency, it supports the methods your customers actually use, or you negotiated a rate worth having. Then you go to connect it and find your platform has no plugin for it.
There are four ways out of this, and three of them are more expensive than they look.
Option 1: Build the integration yourself
Always possible, and consistently underestimated — because the charge call is the small part. What follows it is webhook handling with correct signature verification, refunds and partial refunds, idempotency so a timeout cannot double charge, server-side confirmation, reconciliation into your accounting, and a sandbox-to-live cycle for all of it.
Then you own it. Providers change APIs, deprecate endpoints and rotate requirements, and each change is now your maintenance ticket. Budget the second year, not just the first sprint.
Option 2: Switch to a supported provider
Sometimes this is genuinely right, and it is worth pricing honestly rather than dismissing. But be clear about what you are optimising for. If you picked your provider for settlement currency, local payment methods or approval rates in your market, switching to whichever one happens to have a plugin means choosing your payments partner based on plugin availability instead of on your customers.
That trade is occasionally worth it. It is rarely worth it silently.
Option 3: Switch platforms
Migrating your whole store to get one provider is almost never proportionate. If you are already migrating for other reasons, add provider support to the evaluation criteria. If you are not, this is not the reason to start.
Option 4: Ask whoever supplies your payments layer
Most merchants never try this one, for a simple structural reason: with a direct integration there is nobody to ask. A plugin directory is not a vendor. The plugin author owes you nothing, and the platform did not promise your provider.
So the real question is not whether asking works. It is whether you have anyone to ask.
Why “we’ll add it” usually means a quarter
When every provider is its own plugin, adding one means writing a new plugin. Even when someone else writes it, the result lands on you: install it, configure it, test it, redeploy, and add one more thing to keep updated. The timeline is long because the unit of work is large and it ends on your side.
It only collapses when providers sit behind a single interface. Then adding one is an adapter written once by the vendor, and nothing about your checkout changes — same API, same plugin, same code. The new provider shows up as an option you switch on.
That is the difference between a quarter and a day: not effort, but where the work lands.
What that looks like in practice
A merchant recently asked us for CCBill — a payment facilitator built around subscription billing and the high-risk verticals most processors decline, not one of the mainstream names. It was live within 24 hours, and added to the platform itself rather than bolted onto that one account, so every other merchant got it at the same time.
The honest caveat: not every provider takes a day. One with unusual authentication, an awkward settlement model or a certification step takes longer, and anyone promising a fixed number for every provider is guessing. What stays constant is which side of the line the work happens on.
How to tell which options you have
Ask your current setup one question: if I needed a new provider next month, who would I ask?
If the answer is a person or a vendor, you have four options. If the answer is “nobody” — you would be searching a plugin directory and hoping — you have three, and they all cost real money.
Where PaymentHood fits
PaymentHood puts 37+ providers behind one API and one plugin, so switching a provider on is a dashboard change rather than an integration project. If the one you need is not in the provider directory yet, that is a request rather than a dead end.
The free plugins cover WooCommerce, WHMCS, VirtueMart, Phoca Cart and J2Commerce. If the underlying idea is new, What Is Payment Orchestration? explains the layer this sits in.