A local payment method, or LPM, is a payment method dominant in one specific country or region rather than globally: iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, Blik in Poland, Pix in Brazil. LPMs are the local subset of the broader alternative payment method family.
Why it matters
In many markets the local method is not an alternative at all, it is the default, and a checkout offering only international cards quietly forfeits the customers who never adopted them. For high risk merchants LPMs carry a second advantage: most are bank based push payments with no chargeback mechanism, so sales through them cannot feed your chargeback ratio. Coverage decisions should follow the data, method share per target market, not a generic checklist, and the first paragraph of any expansion plan should name the LPMs it will support.