How Super.com Used Payments Data to Fuel an International Expansion Strategy

Payments processing isn’t just a box to check. It’s not just another task on the long list of what it takes to be a successful merchant. And it definitely isn’t just a cost of doing business or something you put up with to make sales.

We truly cannot say this enough: when done right, payments can be a growth engine. Once you make payments a business priority and commit to acting on what your payments data reveals, your payments operations can become a true strategic initiative. Retain loyal customers, improve margins, and drive impressive revenue growth, all just by shifting your mindset around payment processing.

Sound like a stretch? For the team at Super.com, a fast-growing online travel agency, it’s already their reality. With Pagos, they’ve turned payments data into a strategic asset that has fueled their international expansion and continuously proves the ROI of their payments team across the business.

Let’s walk through how they did it.

Payments Data and International Growth

When the payments team at Super.com got up and running, they had the right strategic mindset. They knew payment processing could be more than a cost center. And once they brought in Pagos, they were unstoppable. Pagos Insights provided Super.com with immediate visibility into their payments data across processors and regions; that visibility turned ideas into action and gave the team influence across the business.

And business was (and still is) booming. They were ready to expand internationally. There was just one problem: continuing to process payments with a US-centric payments setup would inevitably increase costs and eat into margins. Instead, Super.com's payments team established local entities and processing in each new market and explored alternative payment methods (APMs) popular in each new domicile. The payoff? Higher approval rates, lower processing costs, and better customer experiences.

Tracking Costs and Performance by Region

Pagos made it easy to propose and validate this strategy. With Pagos Insights, the team could track performance in new markets from the start—approval rates, effective rates, and even chargebacks, broken out by currency, country, and processor.

Their first international launch was in the EU, processing in Euros. From there, they plan to expand into the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Each market brings unique processing challenges and business requirements. But with Pagos, they didn’t have to guess. They know:

• Whether their new legal entity lowers costs

• If local processing improves approval rates

• How much volume they can shift to APMs and what the ROI looks like

Powering International Forecasting

Super.com’s Payments team sits within the Finance organization, which means everything they do rolls up to P&L strategy. Pagos helped them share the data Finance needed to improve their modeling of region-specific costs and forecast global revenue. It also made it easier for Finance to break down effective rates by region, track changes over time, and consider the cost and revenue implications of new payment initiatives. 

This is huge! Super.com is using payments data to track business performance and determine if the international expansion strategy they designed is delivering as expected. Whenever we suggest using payments as a business tool, this is exactly what we’re talking about.

Solving Issues Before They Escalate

Having the right expansion strategy and data doesn’t just help with long-term planning—it helps with immediate problem solving.

When Super.com launched a subscription product in Australia, for example, they noticed an unusually high chargeback rate. Pagos surfaced the trend quickly in their Chargebacks dashboard, so the Payments team could dig in and identify any underlying issues before they caused any major damage. It turned out there was a bug in the currency display (AUD vs. USD), which ultimately caused customer confusion and—of course—disputes. They fixed the pricing bug, and chargebacks immediately dropped. Pagos made it clear something was off, and they resolved it before it could snowball.

This is the kind of issue that can damage customer trust, drive up costs, and hurt revenue if you don’t catch it early. Pagos AI-augmented data helped them spot it before it spiraled, ultimately protecting revenue in this new market.

Final Thoughts

With Pagos, Super.com turned their payments operation into a growth engine. They now:

• Expand into new markets with full visibility

• Catch and fix problems early—before they hit the bottom line

• Prove the ROI of new legal entities, processors, and APMs

• Support other teams with reliable, actionable data

As Sarah Boehmer from Super.com’s Payments team put it: “Pagos data has enabled us to prove our value as a payments team.” What could be better?

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This post was written in conjunction with the Payments Team at Super.com.