Importance of Gateway for higher Audience.
When professionals like doctors, auditors or lawyers (in sole proprietary or partnership) launch or maintain their portals online and wish to expand their market, they must consider ‘Best Payment Gateway’ to attract and engage wider range of customers.
When dollar is involved, you want your customers’ purchasing experience on your site to be as seamless and positive as possible — which includes, at its most essential, the checkout experience.
It’s a given that you’ve invested the time to build a beautiful website and purchase quality web hosting. But have you really thought through your checkout process? If it is simple and streamlined (not to mention, secure), you’ll be inviting customers to, well, show you the money.
For many new online merchants it’s a very cumbersome and difficult process to understand ecommerce. They often fail to understand the basics of ecommerce and consequently face problems in setting up their online businesses.
What’s a Payment Gateway?
A payment gateway is your doorway to making sales online. A payment gateway will allow you to charge your customer’s credit/debit card with the purchase he/she makes online.
Just like a physical point of sales terminal at your brick and mortar retail store, the Payment Gateway authorizes you to take card payments directly from your website. The payment gateway acts as a mediator between the transactions that take place on your website and the payment processor. This is needed because it is prohibited, due to security reasons, to transmit transaction information directly from your website to a payment processor. Most online merchant accounts come with a payment gateway included
What to Consider When Choosing a Payment Gateway
- Security– This biggest plus point about a payment gateway is the security it offers your website, which in turns ensures that your customers can buy with confidence. When it comes to cyber-attacks. Ecommerce is a highly vulnerable industry due to the sensitive information exchanged on websites. In fact, 32.4% of all cyber attacks are carried out on Ecommerce websites.
What a payment gateway will do is encrypt the data via a secure sockets layer (SSL) and it works with your bank to determine whether the payment is legitimate.
- Integration – Payment gateways are easily integrated with ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Big commerce, and Magento
- Cost – Like with almost any service, there are fees associated using third-party tools like payment gateways. For transactions processed on behalf of your business, you’ll have to pay fees — so pay attention to your gateway’s costs and do your research before integrating it into your site so you’re not slammed with surprise fees.
These fees charged can include transaction, statement, chargeback, merchant account fees, and likely more.
Accepted Payment Methods
The reality is, the easier you make it for customers to make purchases, the more they’re likely to make. By outfitting your site with a payment gateway that incorporates a wide variety of payment methods, your widening your sales net — 50 percent of regular online shoppers say they’d jump ship on a purchase if they couldn’t use their preferred payment method.
Using your site’s analytics, observe what countries have shoppers visiting your site — preferred payment methods may differ by country.
Plus, it’s also a matter of security: 40 percent of study participants said they would feel more comfortable shopping from a business that offers multiple payment methods.
Compatibility
Of course, an important consideration is how well your gateway will integrate with your current platform — both from a technical and design standpoint. If it takes an over-abundance of messy tricks to incorporate smoothly into your existing structure, you might want to rethink your choice.
Payment Location
Some payment gateways allow customers to complete a transaction within the checkout processes of the website, while others lead users to another site to finish their purchases. Some gateways provide an API that incorporates directly into your site, others reroute visitors to third-party sites. Whatever you choose, consider what will provide the best user experience for your shoppers — if customers trust your site, they might not mind the extra diversion.
Selecting a Payment Gateway
Now to your big decision: choosing a payment gateway for your small biz. It’s a little scary: 46 percent of cart abandonments occur at the payment stage of checkout; if yours isn’t outfitted with a smart payment gateway, you could be looking at lost sales.
Don’t worry: System360.net has listed some of the best gateways
- Amazon Payments
- Paypal Payments
- Authorize.net
- Stripe
- WorldPay
Conclusion
Whether you’re focused on global sales, giving customers an on-brand checkout experience, or boasting your high-quality security standards, there’s a payment gateway suited to your business. Which one has worked best for you? What features of a payment gateway are essential to your operations? Let us know.
