Any merchant that does sell 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 accept payments. That is basically what a payment gateway is needed for.
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 suites your online business.
If you are not having a featured payment gateway integrated within your e-Commerce sites, you are diverting your customer towards your competitors’ websites.
Hence, you should start applying for a payment gateway to your sites now to accept payments online. Below are 4 tips you should consider while adding a payment gateway to your e-Commerce sites.
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 card and online banking, as well.
Let’s say if your business is selling goods that are targeting young teenagers, you might enable alternative payment method such as “Pay4Me”. Pay4Me enable those who do not have access to services of financial institutions to shop online. With Pay4Me, a payment could be made by a third-party who is not the main shopper.
Nowadays, there are a lot of young entrepreneurs who are excited and venturing for their own start-up companies. A start-up is a company working to solve problem 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. In order to ensure the business has positive cash flow with limited funds, start-up will go bootstrapping.
Bootstrapping means less money has to be borrowed and interest costs are reduced. Now, how can start-up saves cost?
If start-up wanted to get a payment gateway for their business, start-up should always look for the payment gateway that enable free subscription and low cost.
iPay88 current start-up package offers zero set-up cost and no annual maintenance fees.
2. 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 wanted to integrate a payment gateway into your e-Commerce websites or shopping cart, you must make sure they are integratable with one another.
3. Payment Method
There are many ways of taking payments that retailers may or may not require other than Visa, MasterCard and American Express.
Few things to consider:
- Does your business handle subscriptions?
- Does your business require tokenisation?
- Does your business need “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. In order to reduce abandoned shopping cart and reduce payment process.
For email payments, let’s say if the merchant nature of business is selling photography services or customizable products, their price might differ from time to time.
In order to receive customizable payments, merchant could use “email payment” service with email to customers and customer could make payments online through there.
4. Support
Imagine that this week #MYCYBERSALE 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? For those who might not know what’s #MYCYEBRSALE, it’s Malaysia largest and biggest online sale which is happening from 9th to 13th October 2017.
Your website support team should be able to contact your payment gateway. 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 (Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) and contact through there for immediate response.
Conclusion
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.
