Comparing Adyen and Stripe’s BFCM Numbers

Stats from two of my favorite Digitally Native Vertical Payment Processors (DNVPs) during the biggest shopping period of the year

Dec 03, 2024

The Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping period is over and two of my favorite DNVPs shared their performance numbers. I am home recovering with the flu while taking care of my daughter, who also has the flu, so please be generous with any numerical or logical mistakes I may have made in this piece.

Adyen

$34B total payments volume
670M transactions, peaking at 163K transactions per minute
99.9999% API uptime, handling a peak of 25K+ requests per second

Stripe

$31B total payments volume
465M transactions, peaking at 137K transactions per minute
99.9999% API uptime, handling a peak of 27K+ requests per second

6-Nines

All the numbers reported here are incredibly impressive but what blew me away was the “6-nines” of API uptime from each DNVP. Stripe initially reported “more than 99.999%” uptime but later changed it to “more than 99.9999%” uptime. Regardless, this is an incredible technical feat to pull off during the biggest shopping period of the year.

To put this in perspective, maintaining 6-nines uptime means Adyen and Stripe, combined, processed more than 1.1 billion transactions with less than 1 second of downtime over a four day period!

Batch Processing

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