Choosing the best online payment gateway provider

Every successful online business wants to build a smooth, seamless, and comprehensive customer experience, and choosing an online payment gateway is a key first step towards achieving that. Modern businesses need payment solutions that offer a complete journey to their customers, guiding them from ‘just browsing’ to checkout with minimal fuss.

The payment gateway, the part of your website that handles the actual payments processing and customer payment information, is far more than a fancy bit of tech. It needs to handle incredibly sensitive data effectively, it needs to enable your clients to pay how they want to, rather than how you want them to, and it needs to look good doing it. Luckily, there are a few rules of thumb for understanding the needs of your business and picking a payment gateway to suit them.

An online payment gateway is the part of your website the customer puts their card data into, but an online retailer looking to accept payments with maximum security needs a deeper understanding, so let’s go over the actual payment process.

A payment gateway is the first step on a payment journey. It’s the spot where the customer puts their data, and it’s the first tool in the merchant’s arsenal for keeping that data safe and secure as it zips around the web.

In fact, many payment gateways will, at every stage, try to minimise the merchant’s PCI DSS (an information security standard) obligations by keeping as many tasks and processes as possible away from the merchant’s website and on the provider’s PCI compliant systems. So it’s not only essential, it’s convenient: the ultimate ‘so you don’t have to’ tech, freeing your business from having to concern itself with the understanding and application of a disparate array of security standards to your checkout experience.

Although all payment gateway providers perform roughly the same task, there’s no universal, single type of payment gateway. These services are offered in an endless number of forms, fashions, and functions, and figuring out which one suits you best is essential to making a smart choice.

There are differences in implementation: some gateways are presented on merchant websites as a distinct ‘iFrame’, embedded in the merchant’s checkout page, or else they redirect the user from the merchant’s site entirely to a page owned by the gateway provider. There are still others that offer an API allowing merchants to integrate the gateway more seamlessly with the layout and design of their own site.

There are also providers that offer payment processing, and ones that don’t. If you’re running a small to mid-sized business, it’s probably not in your interest to open your own merchant account and process payments yourself, so you’ll want to limit yourself to gateways that come backed up by a processor. Bigger businesses, meanwhile, might opt to save themselves some transaction fees by processing payments themselves via their own merchant account.

There’s also the human element to consider. It’s no good having the most up-to-date tech if you can’t get anyone on the phone to help you use it. Your payments tech is needed to take payments, and you need to take payments to survive as a business, making your gateway one of the most crucial gears in the vast machine of your company. Therefore, you want the most talented tech support available to keep it running smoothly and to guide you through implementing and using it as efficiently as possible. You’re going to want a provider that offers assistance in more forms than a chatbot or self-service help section.

As you can see, choosing an online payment gateway is a more complex process than it might initially sound; certainly, more complex than giving ‘best payment gateway’ a quick Google search and picking the top result. Payment gateway providers offer specific products to meet specific needs, and whether they suit you or not has to be found out through exhaustive research.

Yes, there are. And we could be here all day listing the precise differences between builds, implementations, and use cases, but for now, let’s just go over a few of the most common types of payment gateway on the market:

So, you’ve pored over the documentation, contacted a hundred different customer support departments, and finally chosen the payment gateway that will work best for your site. Well, not so fast, because you need to consider how easily your chosen gateway will integrate into your site. The first thing to consider is your location: where are your customers coming from and how do they want to pay? It’s no good crafting a checkout experience perfectly optimised for Visa and Mastercard if your business is going to be conducted primarily in China, for example.

Likewise, you don’t just need a payment processing service that can handle the predominant payment methods in your region, you need a gateway that can accept payments from whatever the popular local alternatives are (think e-wallets and national card schemes). After all, you’ve no need for a payment solution that answers payment problems you don’t have.

What’s more, you’re going to want to find a payment solution that integrates neatly with your existing e-commerce platform. Whether your online store is on Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or any of an endless number of other platforms, it’s simply not worth it to go through the pain of forcibly integrating an otherwise incompatible gateway with your platform. If you find one that seemingly offers everything you could ever want but doesn’t integrate with your platform, you can almost assuredly find a similar but separate option that does. You need a service that saves your business time and resources, not wastes them!

Sorry to say, but there’s no route to the ‘best’ payment gateway for your business that doesn’t involve some research! What’s more, an online payment gateway is essential because online payments are essential. The task of selecting it, navigating through the technical jargon, the data security certificates, and fretting about ease of integration, can seem a daunting one at first. But really, when you ask how to choose an online payment gateway, you’re asking ‘what are the needs of my business?’. As soon as you know what those needs are, you know what you’re looking for in a gateway.

Do you run a huge multinational looking to keep down transaction fees? Then you know you probably want to open your own merchant account and handle payment processing yourself. Do you run a retail business in the UK? Then you know you need a gateway that can handle Visa and Mastercard payments, mobile payments like Apple Pay, and perhaps some of the more popular e-wallets. Once you know what you need, you know what you’re looking for.

Ecommpay’s payment gateway combines direct acquiring capabilities, 100+ alternative payment methods, mass payouts, open banking, and more, backed by 24/7 human support, a solid risk management system, and a diverse team of experts ready to solve any payment puzzle. Explore our payment products and get in touch with us if you have any questions.