Payment gateway for your website

Payment gateway is an essential part of e-commerce and online sales; therefore, it is very important to evaluate all the offers among payment processing providers and choose the one that satisfied the exact needs of your business.

What is a payment gateway?

A payment gateway is an e-commerce application that connects the card holder, merchant and acquiring bank passing the encrypted sensitive information, such as credit or debit card number, between them. Through the payment gateway we obtain the authorization for our online purchases and without it the seller would not be able to accept the payments on his website from its customer.

Types of payment gateways based on risk level

In relation to the probability of fraud risk, entities classify two types of payment gateway for your website: Low risk, so called safe mode, and high risk, unsecured mode.

Secure low risk payment gateway (3D Secure)

A payment gateway can be considered of low risk if it that operates within 3D Secure mode (Visa), MasterCard (SecureCode), American Express (Safe Key). This type of payment gateway is known to be the safest one due to the fact that the customer, who makes the payment with his card, is required to validate the transaction with a unique code that a bank sends to his mobile phone. This additional level of control allows to reduce the risk of chargebacks and, as a result, this method of accepting payments on your website is the most authorized by financial entities.

Secure mode payment gateway is recommendable for businesses that sell their products and services to the countries included in the high risk of fraud list, the nature of their businesses is of high risk and double authorization is a must in order to assure a smooth growth of the company.

Not secure high risk payment gateway (Without 3D Secure)

Applying for a payment gateway in NOT secure mode does not mean that the terminal is not safe to accept credit card payments, but that it is not protected by anti-fraud 3D Secure protocol (Visa), MasterCard (SecureCode), American Express (Safe Key). That is, when making the purchase, the client doesn’t have to introduce a unique PIN to validate the operation. This type of payment gateway is quite hard to obtain because it involves a very high risk of fraud and chargebacks. Generally financial entities, in order to grant this kind of terminal to a business, withhold certain amount, called rolling reserve, from its corporate account in order to lower the risks and have additional protection layer against the debts.

Not secure high risk payment gateway is indicated for businesses that don’t require cardholder´s identification, such as MOTO, recurring payments and online stores that are forced to accept more risk in order to sell their products or services.

How to choose the best payment gateway for your online store?

When choosing a payment gateway for your online store, it is very important to take into consideration the following steps:

• Proper functionality

Proper functionality of a payment gateway is a key factor that the owner of an online business has to consider. It is essential for the growth of your business to offer to your clients a method of payment that works smoothly and doesn’t give errors.

• Security

The growth of e-commerce sector triggered the growth of online frauds and illicit activities that take place every day on the spaces of Internet. Since the client has to provide such a sensitive information as a card number, make sure the payment gateway that you will use works under anti-fraud and anti-money laundering protocols. It will be easier for the clients to buy your product or service when they feel safe.

• Fees

Unfortunately, nothing comes for free in the world and if you want a good payment processing service for a website you have to be ready to accept the fees established by the provider. Choose the fees plan that suits your business and don’t forget to ask about the costs of chargebacks and refunds, because these are normally much higher than regular fees.

• Customer support

You can work with the best payment gateway in the world, but if it doesn’t have a good customer service, it worth nothing. We all have questions that we want to be solved and at some point, the payment gateway might give an error that has to be resolved as soon as possible and that´s when the good customer service plays a key role. Choose a payment processing provider that you can contact easily and through various channels.

• Interface

What looks good, feels good. It is true, sometimes we decide for something just because we like how it looks and payment gateway interface is not an exception. Just keep in mind that you will have to log in on daily basis to check how your sales go and it is very important, in a long term, to like what you see.

• Internationality/ currency/ language

Before choosing the payment gateway, make sure that it fulfills all the needs your business has for its growth. For example, if you want to sell abroad and in different currencies, the payment gateway has to include multi-language and multi-currencies features.

• Usability

Usability and clients experience are another key factor when choosing the best payment gateway for your web. The client is the king and you want him to have a positive experience while paying for your product. Make sure that the forms don’t include too many required fields and reduce the steps of the purchase process to the minimum.