Top Tips For Selecting A Payment Gateway For Ecommerce Sites

Posted on January 28, 2010 
Filed Under Articles, Merchant Accounts, Shopping Carts, Third Party Merchant Accounts

A warm welcome for today’s guest article from an online e-commerce web site “Wood and Beyond” importers and specialist suppliers of high quality hardwood products based in the UK. Enjoy!

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Wood and BeyondIf you are planning to start selling online anytime soon, you are very likely to be evaluating different payment gateways for your store. With so many payment gateways to choose from what should you be looking for? Here are couple of tips to help you decide.

1. Ease of integration – Most shopping cart applications such as OS Commerce, Magento and co offer pre-build modules which will work with a particular payment gateway. Look at those first, otherwise you might need expensive coding to get a different payment gateway working.

2. Reputation matters – The big payment gateways have transparent associations or in some cases are owned by a big financial institute. This means that visitors to your online store might recognize the payment provider and feel safer in shopping with you.

3. Go local for better support – From time to time you might need to contact your payment gateway for help and advice. It will be easier if the payment gateway is based in your country so you share the same working days and hours.

4. Back end functionality is essential – You might not know it yet, but you’re going to spend some time at your online account within the payment gateway going over payment details, troubleshooting issues with your website and testing. It’s therefore essential that the payment provider gives you access to a functional back end.

5. Pay attention to the service costs – There’s heavy competition between the various providers all fighting for your business. Because of that prices change between providers and you should always try to negotiate a better deal than the one you see online.

6. Don’t limit yourself – It’s a good idea to always offer a back up payment gateway go give visitors more choice and to have a fail-safe just in case. Services such as PayPal and Google Checkout offer a great solution for a secondary payment gateway which can work along side the main payment gateway.

7. Evaluate basic vs full integration – Basic integration is the option most online stores use. With this option the customer is taken to the payment provider’s site to complete the payment and returned after completion to your store. On the other hand full integration means the customer stays in your store to complete the payment. Due to security measures needed for this type of integration it might come out very expensive.

Good luck with your online store.

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Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Co-Founder at Wood and Beyond, sellers of worktops ranging from ash worktops to iroko worktops. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing and is an active blogger.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Top Tips For Selecting A Payment Gateway For Ecommerce Sites”

  1. Godswill Nkanu on January 29th, 2010 7:52 pm

    I’ll really love to have a website with your help,cos i dont have one and i’m still new about internet biz. Help me! Thanks (NIGERIA)

  2. Nancy Redford on February 10th, 2010 7:10 pm

    Hi,

    I would suggest reading through some of the articles on the blog and looking at the Internet Marketing Center for their guidance and training providing 30 days of access before you commit:
    http://www.miriadz.com/IMC

    Good luck,

    Nancy

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