What to consider when choosing a gateway

A good payments system will ensure you receive your money quickly and without fuss – and without charging you fees that make you wince. Payments providers bill you for their services in a number of different ways: some take a percentage of sales, others charge annually or have periodical processing fees, while some might take fees per transaction on top.
 

When you’re working out how much you are prepared to pay, you need to assess exactly what you’re getting for your money and what difference it will make to the running of your business. You might not mind paying a little more for a system that comes with inbuilt customer service interaction or accepts more ways to pay, so you’re getting some extra bang for your buck.

A payments system is not much good if it doesn’t work with what you have. If you have an online shop or e-commerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, make sure your payment gateway is easy to integrate and simple to install.
 

If your business takes in-person payments using a card machine, the digital system complements the physical system for greater ease. Having an all-in-one solution, with in-person payments and your online payment gateway is a great way to simplify accounting, reconciliation and also data management. Even if you don’t yet have a physical site, if you pick a provider with all options available, scaling up becomes much easier.

When you sell online the whole world is your potential customer. With currency solutions, you can display your prices in the local currency where a browser is located, based on its IP address. With the option of more than 100 currencies, it opens up markets you might not have had access to before. Not only that, but when using a solution like Multi-Currency Conversion or Dynamic Currency Conversion, the customer knows at the point of sale exactly how much will appear on their credit or bank statement. This reduces the number of chargebacks you’re likely to see because the customer remembers what they paid for.
 

It’s also good to offer customers flexibility in the types of payment methods they can use. Gone are the days of typing out the 16 digits on the front of a card. Offering a multitude of methods, from credit and debit cards to digital wallets, gives customers the choice they want over how they settle up. After all, more than a quarter of shoppers admit to abandoning an online purchase if they couldn’t pay their preferred way.

A payments system only works for you if it works for your customers too. Payment needs to be quick and simple to avoid shoppers abandoning carts midway through a transaction.
 

Options such as stored shopper, make it easier for a buyer to become a regular customer. This allows easy recurring payments and lets buyers customise how they want to pay. It also links cleverly to a communications system for sellers: it’s simple for you to offer exclusive promos, discounts and payment plans to those on your mailing or SMS lists.
 

Hosted payment solutions, either components or an entire page, makes for a much securer checkout process. Customers’ sensitive card data is entirely handled by the payment gateway and never touches your servers, making PCI-DSS compliance much simpler. A good hostedpayment solution will maintain the look and feel of your website, rather than directing them to another site, maintaining your brand identity and reducing cart abandonment.

Given the amount of information about you and your customers that’s stored on your transaction system, it has to be airtight. Unsafe systems can leave you victim to problems such as hacking or fraud, or potentially leave your customers at risk of data leaks and breaches of GDPR.
 

Hosted payment solutions (above) are one form of defence, but you should consider more options. Look for a gateway provider with built in anti-fraud technology or opt for additional extras like machine learning tools and encryption.