Payment Systems vs. POS, Web, or Mobile eCommerce
How to Avoid Extra Expenses and Sticking in the Process
This post was originally published on www.geeksolutions.co
Almost every online and even offline business requires payment processing.
It’s a fact.
The easier it will be for your customers to pay for your goods or services, the more revenue you’re going to generate. The most common and convenient way to receive payments online is to integrate your website, service or mobile app with payment systems, or gateways, that are common among your customers.
Why Should You Read This?
At Geek-Solutions, we’ve integrated with a range of payment gateways. All of them have their specific own APIs with unclearly described features or multiple implicit errors.
These factors complicate integration and impose additional responsibility on a developer. And now we want to share some first-hand experience. It will be helpful for merchants to avoid possible issues on the way to accepting credit cards and online payments.
The Ideal Payment System Portrait
How to describe the payment system which best fits your business? So, the ideal payment system is:
- Secure
Users' payment details must be stored as secure as it is necessary to set the breach chance to near-zero level. Otherwise, the merchant will lose its customers’ trust just in one moment. A PCI-DSS Compliance suffices for this purpose.
- With fast processing
The processing time of payments is a critical feature for a wide range of businesses. Slow processing leads to high abandon rates among users.
- Has low fees
Today’s businesses generally have low margins due to high competitiveness, so the lowest possible fee level is a total must.
- Well documented and supported
Reduced documentation and deficient support are two main pains for the developers who integrate any payment system. These two issues make integration longer, more expensive, and often significantly decrease its quality.
- With fewer bugs
The more bugs a specific payment system has, the more problems your business will face with its customers. Moreover, bugs in the payments sometimes cause substantial financial losses.
- Has a minimal level of chargebacks and declined transactions
If the chargebacks become a regular thing, the business should prepare for heavy losses. It’s right for declined transactions too.
- Mobile-friendly
Mobile payments are trendy across the globe. If your business is unable to receive them, in most cases, you lose significant profits.
- Popular among your audience
Of course, the payment system should be pretty standard among your audience. Otherwise, its integration is just a waste of time and money.
- With stable sandbox
Testing of software on real users is not a good practice even if we say about a simple website. But in the case of the payment system, it may lead to losses and massive dissatisfaction.
- Remaining compatible with time
Sometimes you update your software tools with new features. The payment system you have integrated should stay functioning after these updates without the necessity of hiring a coding team and going offline on maintenance for several days.
Wait. What About Specific Payment Systems?
Let’s present to you with some info on specific payment systems. A part of the data you can read below is based on our own experience and may become slightly outdated over time. Also, the bug rate is based on what we faced during the integrations. Most of the information holds true for the US.
Chase Pay
This payment system is proprietary of one of the most prominent US financial institutions, JPMorgan Chase. It had as many as 46.7 mln digital customers by the end of 2017. Chase Pay provides a checkout with online, contactless or QR payments. As the integration finishes, you can add the Chase Pay button on your site or app.
Our integration experience has fraught with a cloud of bugs. Moreover, the payment gateway stopped working after the Gradle build tool was updated, so we had to roll its previous version back.
Users Geography: USA
Popularity: high
Merchant Fees: pricing per transaction is tiered, the monthly fee for Retail, Mobile, Online — $9.95, for Retail + Mobile Checkout — $16.95, the monthly minimum is $25
Bug rate: 9.6 (less is better)
Integration duration: long
Total score: 3/10 (more is better)
ACH Payments
Automated clearing house (ACH) is a leading US financial network, which provides the possibility of direct payments. It means that the transfers come directly from one bank account to another without the use of credit cards, cash, checks, etc. Typically, the processing takes from three to five business days.
Moreover, the checkout process requires an account and routing numbers which users should input manually. However, it negates it all by having much lower commissions. Some operations during the checkout even in mobile are realized in the HTML iframes, which causes detection errors. Coupled with a vast number of bugs and poor documentation, it leads to a rather long and complicated integration process.
Users Geography: USA, Puerto Rico
Popularity: high
Merchant Fees: $0.25-$0.75 per transaction
Bug rate: 6.8
Integration duration: long
Total score: 5/10
Moneris
Canadian-created Moneris is a direct processor, which doesn’t use any third-party services. Working with credit cards, mobile payments, and POS, Moneris Solutions provides everything merchants need for both retail and online, including hardware.
All the solutions are correctly documented. However, the obligatory 3-year contract, $300 early termination fee for each location, and quite poor support slightly mar the impression.
Users Geography: USA, Canada
Popularity: high
Merchant Fees: upon request only
Bug rate: 2.8
Integration duration: average
Total score: 8/10
Apple Pay
Apple Pay is a system designed especially for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch holders. It allows users to add debit, credit, or prepaid cards into a single wallet and then to pay both offline and online with a few taps. It’s pretty secure because the card info never comes from outside the app.
The system is well-documented and ideally polished. During the integration, we didn’t find a single bug. What’s more, its usage is completely free: the company charges only banks.
Users Geography: worldwide
Popularity: very high
Merchant Fees: no fees for merchants nor users
Continue reading at geeksolutions.co
Hey friends! If you found this post valuable, please clap and share it.
