What are the pros and cons of having multiple payment gateways on your website?
Payment gateways are the ultimate go-to for both B2B and B2C companies as they ensure your company gets the benefit out of the online payment collection process. And once new customers start availing the services, using multiple payment gateways becomes inevitable.
But as we all know, not all payment gateways tend to work effectively at the same time.
With multiple payment gateways to choose from, customers can opt for the perfect transaction route in the region as per convenience. And while adding multiple payment gateways is the need of the hour, it has its pros and cons.
Before we dive into the pros & cons, let’s segue into what are (multiple) payment gateways and why use them?
What is Multiple Payment Gateways?
A payment gateway is a technology that collects and transfers payments securely from the customer to the merchant or business. Multiple payment gateways indicate that a merchant (YOU) offers various online payment gateways on a single website. And by integrating them, your business can provide higher customer satisfaction and collect instant settlements.
Why use multiple payment gateways?
Multiple payment gateways come with an assurance that if any online payment gateway is experiencing a low success rate or downtime, customers can use an alternative payment method! Thereby increasing the rate of successful transactions for your business.
As mentioned earlier, integrating multiple gateways has its pros and cons. Let’s take a look at them! Perhaps, it will help you make a more informed decision for your business.
The Pros of having Multiple Payment Gateways
1. Increases customer satisfaction
For a business, there’s nothing better than achieving customer satisfaction. And by offering multiple payment gateways, you can build a strong trust factor between your business and customers.
A customer wouldn’t want to fill in the bank details on a payment gateway that they haven’t heard of before! So when the customer visits the checkout page and has more than one payment gateway to choose from, they will opt for the most-used payment option in the region. And in case you need to reimburse a customer, you can send payouts within a few clicks with just the recipient’s email address and contact number.
2. Boosts sales
As a business, you can make small changes to take a plunge in the global marketplace. Research suggests that on average, 68.63% of online shopping carts are abandoned before purchases are completed. But 63% of those are recoverable with the right set of offerings.
And enabling multiple payment gateway options is one of them.
Generally, for popular e-commerce websites, location-based shopping isn’t a problem. So customers can pick products of their choice and get them delivered at any given time. But a single payment gateway isn’t enough to process payments from different regions. For collecting payments from customers, merchants offer multiple payment gateways on the platform.
3. Helps run payments smoothly
Technology influences most parts of our life. So we also need to have alternate solutions for business in place to avoid any technical or network problems that come our way, as it’s plausible for payment gateways to experience some downtime too. So if one payment gateway fails to process payments successfully or doesn’t function properly, the customers can always move to another payment gateway.
4. Administers analytical data
Every payment gateway offers a unique database to the seller. And since the relevant data differs, it serves a different purpose for businesses. It helps merchants make better decisions and improve sales.
The Cons of having multiple payment gateways
1. More payment gateways equal more processes
Integrating multiple payment gateways is better for businesses but includes different levels of integrations. And you know what this means, don’t you? It’s time-consuming and sometimes may cause issues after integration. And since merchants usually set up payment gateways on the website, the documentation is rather extensive.
2. It’s expensive!
Setting up multiple payment gateways can cost a fortune. And the amount may increase depending on how much you spend on tracking or processing fees. Businesses often try to avoid such situations by enabling combined payment services. It essentially means that the customer can choose to pay for the products/ services in part credit and part cash.
3. Includes extensive analytical data
This one depends on your accessibility to resources and bandwidth. As a growing business, you will need to adopt multiple payment gateways to collect your payments smartly. But this includes overseeing all kinds of analytical data. It is taxing and requires a separate reporting system to look after them.
4. Requires a collector failover plan
Integrating multiple payment gateways means planning about collector failover. Say, payment gateway 1 fails in processing a payment. What’s the next move? The merchant needs to look at how to go about redirecting the customers. Do businesses directly request the customers to head to payment gateway 2 or 3?
This process will require some solid research as it may affect the conversion rates too. So businesses need to carefully think it through to decide on the best redirection source to reduce the number of failed transactions.
5. Includes more operational challenges & resources
Setting up multiple payment gateways on the website may cause far too many operational challenges.
One such scenario — when the amount is debited, but the transaction isn’t processed!
This includes back and forth, and that’s where businesses need an all-hands-on-deck mindset. Moreover, you will need more IT development resources to see the operations through. And since the gateways have complicated integration processes, there may be more failures than usual. Further, pushing businesses to employ more people to ensure that the gateways function well.
For those interested in making your website wholesome by including multiple payment gateways, here are some bonus questions to give you some additional intel!
How can multiple payment gateways be integrated into a website?
Whether you’re offering your products or services via a website or without, you can set up multiple payment gateways together and at once! You can also integrate as many payment gateways that you require but route them selectively. This way, you can narrow on which payment gateway is used the most and in what region.
What are the essential features to look for while integrating multiple payment gateways?
1. Merge reports on one bookkeeping platform
Multiple payment gateways deliver different analytical data. Businesses must use one single bookkeeping system to consolidate the information generated. So if you’re looking to adopt multiple payment gateways, choose the right ones that can be integrated with the bookkeeping platform used by you. This will help you auto-generate sales reports effortlessly.
Automate bookkeeping with Open, receive insights on payments, settlements, cash flow, refunds and more.
2. Offer more payment modes
It’s great that you’re integrating multiple payment gateways. Are you wondering how to make the payment process more seamless for customers?
Offer more payment modes. Since every customer is different, their payment means may vary too. So by including more payment modes, you can reach more customers and improve your customer experience.
Integrating a payment gateway with Open will give you more flexibility on payment modes. Customers can then choose between cards, internet banking, UPI AutoPay, or others. Make sure you set up a payment gateway that enables you to give your customers more payment options.
3. Be cost-effective
Every business looks for a wise investment. It makes no sense to install a payment gateway that’s expensive and has additional processing fees. So, select payment gates that are high on functionality and are budget-friendly. But don’t compromise on the quality. You can look for MDR (merchant discount rate) for the payment means across different payment gateways before opting for one.
4. Must have a good success rate and timely support
If you select a payment gateway with low success rates, it may affect the conversion rates more. Integrate one that offers a high success rate. Moreover, choose a payment gateway that offers good customer support for when and if you face any server downtime.
5. Should have PCI-DSS compliant security
Once you have a PCI-DSS compliant system, you can let customers store their information on the payment gateway for recurring payments. As many customers set recurring payments while subscribing or buying products from a business.
Are your payments PCI-DSS compliant? If not, no reason to worry. Configure your payments with Open’s payment gateway that’s ISO certified and covers PCI-DSS compliance.
6. Swift and mobile-friendly
Most people depend on their phones to make any payment. So make sure you integrate payment gateways that are mobile-friendly and let customers pay you without any inconvenience.
Want to understand how you can go about integrating Open’s payment gateway on your website?
With Open, you can integrate a payment gateway in two simple ways!
- Applicable for website users, create a payment token using create payment token API. And sign up to generate your unique sandbox access key & secret key from the Open dashboard.
2. Integrate Android & iOS SDKs to collect payments with Open on the app front.
Open takes the woes out of integrating and managing multiple payment gateways for business. You can add, set up, and optimise all your payment options from one dashboard. And the best part is that you can increase your sales and retain customers by overseeing all the transactions from one place.
Before you get started, weigh out the pros and cons of having multiple payment gateways on your website, and adopt the best payment gateway(s) for your business.
