Today, there are thousands of options to choose from when it comes to the choice of payment gateways. So, choosing a payment gateway suitable to your payment processing needs can be extremely challenging. To find the best solution for your business you need to consider several variables as they should relate to your specific e-commerce site.
Primarily, the choice of a gateway has to be based on a certain criterion – that said transaction pricing, integration process, need for additional features, etc. Depending on those different criteria and ease of software implementation, your choice will vary and narrow.
For small or startup merchants, the choice of gateway solutions may be limited to one or maximum three gateways that would be willing to deal with them.
And this fact makes it very difficult to choose a real good payment gateway software for businesses.
The reason is that there is not any payment gateway that would meet the basic needs of every e-commerce business globally and in any currency.
That’s why before deciding which features of payment platforms are the most needed for selling your specific goods or services and limit your choices the only one that would meet best your requirements.
You must realize that the size and country of origin of your online marketplace will play a big role in which processors will work with you. As well as the payment methods and currencies you need to accept. Here are some other aspects you need to take into consideration:
- Software: While some processors provide free apps for startups and low transaction volumes, high-volume websites may have high costs to purchase the payment processing software. Moreover, the software pricing includes various security upgrades, patches and even updates, and the costs related with scaling the software along with business growth.
- Hardware: This means mobile card readers like Square or POS card readers if your e-commerce website has a physical store attached to it. Some stores manually process credit card payments for their online store.
- Miscellaneous. Fees and costs: Sometimes happen that fees can be hidden in small print, and various extra costs will appear over time. Those fees can be anything starting from setup fees to early termination fees.
- PCI Compliance expenses: This can be quite expensive and important concept of a website’s possibility to accept payments online. These costs can also be extremely high for different e-commerce businesses due to the need to keep consumers credit card data secure.
- Chargeback: Potentially, any sum of money can be returned to the customer for purchases made with credit card, so merchants need to pay additional fees to the payment processor.
- Transaction Processing: Not every processor is able to process high-volume transactions on a regular basis. So, it’s essential to know your processor’s transaction volume limit.
- Online Transaction Processing: merchants should pay transaction processing fees every week or month.
- Maintenance: This includes support for merchant account, tech support, support for customers, and software.
- Flat Fee: Once merchant receives a payment, he’s obliged to pay a per transaction flat fee.
So, choosing a payment gateway can require knowing much more concepts if you can imagine as you need to know well all about features and services you’re going to provide, in what countries and currencies you’re interested to accept. Once you’ve decided all those concepts, you can easily make the right choice of a payment gateway for your e-commerce website. For more information about payment gateway integration process, contact us.