Have you ever had an incident where you try to pay online on an eCommerce platform, but the site/app doesn't support your preferred payment methods?. Believe it or not, it's very common in eCommerce stores.
This is one thing that you need to avoid in your e-commerce store at any cost. If the payment options aren't seamless and user-friendly, your customers will abandon their carts and go elsewhere to buy stuff.
If you have integrated a payment gateway with your eCommerce store, you can eliminate all these issues. However, choosing the right payment gateway for your e-commerce store is a huge task. Fear not! This article will help you with that.
What Is A Payment Gateway?
The term payment gateway may sound like jargon at first. In a nutshell, a payment gateway is an intermediary that connects the customers and merchants. So when you click 'pay now' on an eCommerce application or website, a payment gateway quickly verifies your transaction credentials and authorizes the money transfer from your account to the merchant's account.
A payment gateway facilitates fast, secure, and hassle-free transactions between sellers and buyers. Paypal, Stripe, and 2Checkout are some examples of payment gateways.
Types Of Payment Gateways
There are two kinds of payment gateways out there, such as:
- Hosted payment gateway
- It redirects customers to payment gateway's hosted page and collects the customers' payment credentials from there.
- The payment gateway's hosted page fully follows all the security compliances and requirements.
- Easy to set up and requires no customization
- Integrated payment gateway
- Customers aren't redirected to a separate page. All interactions are handled on the e-commerce website itself.
- The e-commerce store is responsible for data security and other security compliances
- Easily customizable to cater to specific business needs and strategies.
As you can see, security is the most significant concern in integrated payment gateways. But, hosted payment gateways have a comparatively poor user experience. Customers may find the redirecting experience a bit laggy.
However, some payment gateways offer both integrated and hosted payment gateway system as part of their services. For example, Paypal has a unique package that allows us to customize and integrate the payment gateways on the e-commerce website itself. But, the choice is entirely up to you.
Know Your Target Audience
The groundwork for integrating a payment gateway starts here. This is where you fully understand the real importance of a payment gateway for your e-commerce store.
People have varied preferences when it comes to online payments. Some people like traditional credit /debit cards based payments. But, some people prefer more sophisticated payment modes like e-wallets, e-checks, digital currencies, UPI, and so on. As an eCommerce platform, you should satisfy these different groups of people in the best way possible. And, that's why you need a payment gateway.
If you know what kinds of payment methods that your target audience prefers the most, it becomes easier for you and your eCommerce app development team to find out the most suitable payment gateway for your eCommerce store.
Ensure Payment Security
In the wake of recent data theft reports, customers are a bit skeptical about the safety of online payment. Therefore, data security is of paramount importance for eCommerce businesses.
As I mentioned before, choosing a hosted payment gateway can be your first step towards that direction. There are also other security standards that you need to look into before selecting a payment gateway such as PCI compliance, SSL 128 bit encryption, GDPR compliances, etc.
Furthermore, it's worth considering modern security features like tokenization, digital signatures, two-step verification, fingerprint, Face lock, and so on. Remember that security never becomes an unwanted luxury. The more is always better.
The Costs Should Be Reasonable
All payment gateways do not have similar price ranges. Besides transaction fees, some payment gateways also have set up fees, monthly fees, other hidden charges, and plan limitations. So, you need to keep all these costs as low as possible and make sure the overall costs fit your budget.
Focus On User Experience
The users should be able to make their payments as conveniently as possible across all devices. If a payment gateway fails to deliver such a user experience, it can rub customers the wrong way.
So when you choose a payment gateway, you need to pay extra attention to its user experience. The payment gateway should require only a few steps and credentials to make a payment. Once the customer clicks 'confirm', the payment should be completed with minimum processing time and downtime.
You also want to keep the payment failures as low as possible. When such things happen, the payment gateway should immediately rectify those issues and offer proper guidance for customers.
Customer Support Is Vital
Although payment gateways eliminate most of the common complications regarding online payment, failures and errors may still happen due to other technical issues and slow internet connectivity. A payment gateway provider should rectify such problems immediately. If the customers have any other queries and confusions, the service providers should readily respond to them and give proper guidance for the customers. If the payment gateway doesn't have that receptive customer support, that may not be the right one for you.
Final Thoughts
When you set up an e-commerce store, you need to decide what kind of payment methods that you want to integrate with your platform. If you've done your homework on that, it will be so much easier for you to hire the best mobile app development company or commerce developers to set up an eCommerce store.