Understanding Your Payment Gateway (Vol. 2)

Being a staple for online stores, payment gateways act as an intermediate between the merchant and the customers at an e-commerce website. As discussed in the previous post, by validating the credit card details of your customers, a payment gateway ensures the availability of funds and gets you paid easily. However, with the abundance of payment processing options in the market, choosing the right payment gateway for your online store can be a daunting task. There are various factors that you must take into consideration before selecting a payment gateway that best matches your needs.

Choosing the best Payment Gateway

With varying requirements of merchants based on the size, nature, and reach of their businesses, there are a lot of choices among the gateways present in the market. Considering the following factors can help you make an informed decision:

1. Set-up and Transaction Costs
   When you sign up for a particular payment gateway, you have to pay a set-up fee that is one time. However, what you need to be aware of is the transaction charges that the payment gateway imposes for per transaction. You also need to check if it charges any monthly fee. These charges should be as minimum as possible since these costs can cut down your profit. Most of the well-known payment gateways charge quite high transaction fees.
2. Security
   Before investing in a particular payment gateway, you must ensure the level of PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance that it follows. Also, you need to know what additional measures are taken by the gateway, if any, to prevent your website from fraudulent activities. This is imperative if you want to protect your business from swindles and maintain a healthy reputation in the market.
3. Support
   With payment processing being a critical part of your business, it is very important to resolve problems immediately without wasting much time. From live chat to 24*7 support or direct emails, there are various types of support offered by different payment gateways. You must ensure the level of customer support that the gateway is offering.
4. Payout Policy
   Modern payment gateways with this feature allow you not to use a separate merchant account for the transactions. Payouts can be made directly to your bank account and its frequency may vary from weeks to months. However, with large scale businesses, you can open a merchant account as the transaction fees are low.
5. Checkout Experience
   You need to check if there are customizable checkout options and the payment gateway delivers flexible integration with your e-commerce software? On redirecting your customers to a third party payment site, you can disrupt the shopping experience of your customers. With an integrated checkout process, you can assure the security of the confidential customer information as the complete payment process goes on your site.
6. Currency Options
   Having an online business with customers worldwide, it is important for you to make sure that your preferred gateway provider supports your customers’ currencies. Some payment gateways are focused on domestic customers and thus only accept payments in USD. Others might accept Canadian dollars and Euros. However, if you want more currency options for your gateway, PayPal and Sagepay are good to go with, as they both accept up to 20 different currencies.

Want to enhance your customers’ experience on your e-commerce website?