Any merchant that sells online or has an e-commerce business website needs to have a payment gateway that is seamlessly integrated into his or her business sites.
To be in business, you must sell things. To sell things, money must be in the medium of exchange. For money to flow, you need a way or method of accepting payments.
That is basically what a payment gateway is needed for.
Features of payment gateway
The payment gateway allows you to:
- Accept payments quickly and conveniently,
- Keep your customer’s money and personal data securely,
- Gain your customers’ trust, because they’re willing to hand over their personal information and money to you.
A payment gateway helps you to accept payments and generate income, but it does come at a cost.
It is always important to choose a reputable and reliable payment gateway provider that suits your online business.
If you do not have a featured payment gateway integrated within your e-commerce sites, you are diverting your customers towards your competitors’ websites.
Hence, you should start applying for a payment gateway to your sites now to accept payments online.
Below are the tips you should consider while adding a payment gateway to your e-commerce sites.
Tips 1: Choose according to your needs
If your business sells internationally, your payment gateway must be able to provide the collection of payments that are made using international cards, like Visa and MasterCard.
Not only that, if you have a large domestic customer base, your payment gateway should be able to collect payments through debit cards and online banking, as well.
Let’s say your business is selling goods that are targeting young teenagers, you might enable alternative payment methods such as “Pay4Me“. Pay4Me enables those who do not have access to the services of financial institutions to shop online.
With Pay4Me, a payment could be made by a third party who is not the main shopper.
Tips 2: Cost effective
Nowadays, there are a lot of young entrepreneurs who are excited and venturing into their own start-up companies. A start-up is a company working to solve problems where the solution is not obvious and the success is not guaranteed.
All start-up companies have something in common: they always try to save money. To ensure the business has a positive cash flow with limited funds, the start-up will go bootstrapping.
Bootstrapping means less money has to be borrowed and interest costs are reduced. Now, how can a start-up save costs?
If a start-up wants to get a payment gateway for its business, the start-up should always look for a payment gateway that enables free subscription and low cost.
iPay88 current start-up fees offer zero set-up cost and no annual maintenance fees.
Tips 3: Technology integration
Are you looking to improve your e-commerce sites or upgrade technology soon?
Let’s face the truth, almost all of our projects that we start require some revision or touch-up sooner or later.
It is important to review API compatibility for the technology you have or looking to acquire.
When you want to integrate a payment gateway into your e-commerce websites or shopping carts, you must make sure they can be integrated.
Apart from that, do note that there are differences between the online shopping cart and the payment gateway.
Tips 4: Payment methods
There are many ways of taking payments that retailers may or may not require other than Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.
A few things to consider:
- Does your business handle subscriptions?
- Does your business require tokenisation?
- Does your business need a “Pay Now” sentence in your emails?
To answer that, iPay88 payment gateway “recurring payments” methods will solve and handle your subscription payments for merchants.
This will ease and simplify your payment collection process. To reduce abandoned shopping carts and reduce the payment process.
For email payments, let’s say if the merchant nature of the business is selling photography services or customizable products, their price might differ from time to time.
To receive customizable payments, merchants could use an “email payment” service with an email to customers and customers could make payments online through there.
Tips 5: Great support
Imagine that you are having a big sale day taking place or it is the payday of the month, and your website stops accepting credit card payments, won’t you feel frustrated by losing sales?
Your website support team should be able to contact your payment gateway.
The merchant should also be able to contact or should know who their account managers from the payment gateway are to ease the communication process.
Effective communication with the support team or key account manager could reduce the losses to a minimum.
Merchants could also use alternative communication channels such as social media and contact through there for immediate response.
Choose the right payment gateway
With the tips above, be smart and choose the right payment gateway that best suits your business needs. Prices should not always be the main factor when choosing a payment gateway, instead look up for the support, features or value provided by payment gateway.
Come talk to iPay88 – ASEAN’s leading payment company on how you can grow your business with us.
