Choosing the Right Payment Gateway for E-Commerce Newbies

What the factors you need to keep in mind before choosing a payment gateway? Which payment gateway fits your requirement? Which payment options are offered that tap to your target market?

For every newcomer in ecommerce, it is hard to decide which platform is the best out of the bunch. We have broken it down to the top 5 things you need to figure out before choosing the right one.

What is the length of commitment?

There are a couple of instances where customers are sealed with a payment gateway for more than two years. This may not be a recognizable issue in the short term, but it is an imminent issue for inexperienced e-commerce businesses.

This will be a problem if you find that the service is not fitting for some time, which could be an issue of uptime, hidden fees or even security concerns.

When possible, find a payment gateway that did not have lengthy contract time. Also, don’t forget the tedious, time wasting process if you want to modify payment gateway.

Does your payment gateway support your ecommerce platform?

Before identifying the supporting payment gateway, you should identify the type of platform you are, which could be Enterprise, Hosted, Basic, Open Source, Add-on or Customized.

Whichever platform your e-commerce stands on, you should find a payment gateway that already has a plugin for your platform.

Do you want a traditional payment process or a particular payment process?

There are various types of procedure that payment gateways can use to process transactions, but traditionally transaction processes comes in 4-step.

At the merchant site, the transaction is already processed and done. However, there are a few payment gateways that provide a lean approach to the payment process, which is shown below.

Although there may not be a visible difference for merchants, but it does make an impact for the customers. An easier payment process would certainly give a convenience approach for customers.

What is the online percentage of the payment gateway?

The uptime of payment gateway is one of the most undermined factors in determining a payment gateway. However, uptime should be considered critical for your business. Thus, you want to work with a provider that has a high uptime, so you wouldn’t worry for outages or patches.

Razer Merchant Services boast a 99.96% uptime, which is currently the highest in their region of service.

Does the payment gateway support your target market?

There are plenty of choices for payment options in the market, from the credit cards’ big names of Visa and Mastercard to the special payment options specially developed for a country. Each payment gateway supports one or more payment options in your target market. You should make sure that your target market fits the payment option you are equipped with.

If you are not sure with your target market, it is always safe to provide a bigger payment options to your potential customers.