Choosing The Right Payment Gateway: Which Boxes Are To Tick

Umbrella IT wrote a story on our App Developers Blog covering Choosing The Right Payment Gateway: Which Boxes Are To Tick.

As soon as you are involved in any e-commerce activity as a selling party you will undoubtedly search for the best way to collect payments. Since paying with credit and debit cards are the more preferred methods for online shoppers (according to Statista data), you are likely to face the choice of a payment gateway. The nine years’ experience of Umbrella IT in web and mobile development, including e-commerce sites and apps, allows to single out several factors to be considered while choosing the right one.

The payment gateway is in charge for safe and reliable routing a client’s payment data from an online shop to a processing company for further transaction processing.

To make the right choice you should start with two arguments:

• expenses for the gateway shall not be excessive for your business;
• possibilities offered by the gateway shall work for your business development.

Stand Secure

The payment gateway as the first point in your client’s data transfer process shall guarantee absolute security and be safe from cyber-attacks, penetration activities, and vulnerabilities.

Therefore, on a first-priority basis check the PCI compliance issues and whether any other security methods are used (3D secure, AVS, CVM, tokenization, etc).

Stripe is certified as PCI Level 1 Service Provider based on the results of the audit performed by an independent PCI Qualified Security Assessor. Level 1 is the most stringent certification level establishment within the payments industry. You can check the certification status info anytime here.

Minimize Limits

This is the payment gateway that shall suit your business needs and not vice versa. Therefore, consider how many payment methods are supported, what currencies are available for transactions, what countries are covered, what is the settlement period, etc. Find the offer that ideally suits your specific needs.

Bambora North America office provides support for businesses located in the United States and Canada with more advantageous terms. Therefore, Umbrella IT chose two gateways for their Bounce project: Beanstream (Bambora) for Canada as the target region and Stripe as a more internationally-focused gateway.

Get Money’s Worth

Payment gateways providers are making money and not going to render their services for nothing. Therefore, look more closely at the plans and fees they offer. Whether any setup and monthly fees are charged or you will pay per transaction only.

Authorize.Net offers three options to choose from:

• All-in-One (includes both merchant account and payment gateway) with monthly gateway fee of $25 and per transaction 2.9% + 30¢
• Payment Gateway Only with monthly gateway fee $25 and per transaction 10¢, daily batch fee 10¢
• Enterprise Solutions (provided you process over $500K per year) with tailored pricing.

Choose Technically Feasible Solution

The payment gateway that is not working properly or inspires little credibility will cost you abandoned shopping carts and canceled purchases. Therefore, give additional consideration to implementation tools: what platforms and programming languages are covered, whether the documentation is complete and the solutions offered are sufficient.

Stripe is focused on the development issues and offers easy and simple integration solutions including detailed documentation, simple API and libraries for various languages and platforms: Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Node, Go, .NET, iOS, and Android.

Be Supported

As in any business deal, read the fine print prior to signing the agreement with a payment gateway provider. Consider any early termination fee, check what the chargeback and dispute settlement processes look like. In general, check what channels are offered to submit a support request and what time is the company customer service available.

Along with the official information it is useful to read users’ reviews and cases as well as the feedback the provider gives to such reviews. This is particularly significant for negative user experience. You should be sure the provider will not let you alone in case of eventual problems.

Think Ahead

As soon as your business develops, your needs and requirements to payment systems will change as well. Therefore, it is recommended to think in advance of any limits related to dependency on a certain bank or merchant account, or other restrictions that may cause you time and efforts in case you intend to change the gateway provider or the plan.

In 2010 Braintree launched the credit card data portability initiative. At that time the majority of providers did not allow the clients to port the data which had a binding effect upon the merchants. Braintree invited like-minded providers to join and allow a merchant porting the card associated information in case of moving to another provider. The portability, if offered, saves you much time and efforts and contributes to the fair competition principles in the payments industry, in general.

The figure above is to remind you of the key moments. In case you have more to ask, do not hesitate to contact Umbrella IT !

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Originally published at www.appfutura.com.