The top ways to accept online payments without a website

Today, most savvy business owners are acutely aware of the need to offer customers multiple ways to make payments online. If your buyers don't see the payment methods they know and trust, you'll quickly experience abandoned shopping carts and ultimately, reduced profits. 

But are you aware that there are ways to accept online payment without a website at all? 

Today's consumer is increasingly making payments from a smartphone or tablet, and they're often doing so whilst on the move. This has led to the emergence of several innovative methods to accept payments online without a website that may not currently be on your radar. In this article, we'll take a look at some of those technologies to help you decide if they might be a good fit for your business.

Payment links are best understood as digital invoices. When a payment link is sent via email or messaging app — or in the case of Ecommpay, through our unique merchant dashboard  — customers simply click or tap the link to view the invoice and then quickly make a payment by entering their card details. Payment processing can be completed in just a few clicks or taps of the screen, making this a popular choice for businesses that regularly issue invoices to customers, or those looking to accept credit card payments without having to implement a full payment portal with all of the associated web developer costs.

The biggest advantage of pay-by-link is how fast the payment processing technology can be deployed. You won't need an integration or even a payment gateway to get started, allowing you to accept online payments without website or even shopping cart implementation. That means there's no need to build a complex IT infrastructure or hire a development team, making pay-by-link a great fit for brick-and-mortar businesses looking to get online fast, or companies offering bespoke services where customer invoices need to be generated.

Pay-by-link invoices are sent from the main business domain, and although the payment pages connected to pay-by-link don't live on a company's website, they can be customised to match the corporate design and colours, providing greater levels of trust, improving conversion and allowing companies to save time compared to manual email invoicing and providing a better way of keeping track of financial flow.

A Mobile Software Development Kit, or mSKD for short, is a way of integrating a payment form into your company's mobile app, offering another method to accept payments that doesn't rely on a website-based online payment gateway.  

Ecommpay is a world leader in this type of payment method, with its own mobile SDK enabling easy and fast integration. Mobile SDK combines all the features customers expect from a payment form, including the ability to scan bank cards, set up recurring billing and offer a fully customisable and secure payment page that's compatible with both iOS and Android devices.

The obvious advantage of offering app-based payments is the ability to offer your customers a seamless and region-specific payment experience. You'll be able to display region-specific messages at the checkout, as well as other localisation options, whilst also offering the payment methods your customers are most familiar with, including Google Pay, Apple Pay, and regular card payments.

These days, taking payments on your company's website needn't involve complex integrations or the potential headache of keeping your customers' data safe and complying with PCI DSS requirements. For example, Ecommpay's payment pages are hosted on a secure server and can be integrated into your website as an iFrame or lightbox, or via a simple redirect. 

Hosting payment pages away from your website on a secure server allows you to dynamically modify the options you present to customers, depending upon their location, payment history or many other factors.

Whether a business integrates payment pages into their website using a plugin (in the case of popular CMS solutions such as Magento or WordPress) or embeds pages using iFrames or lightboxes, there are plenty of features that can improve conversions.

• Integrated OneClick payment functionality for bank cards and alternative payment methods.
• Regular updates and upgrades that won't break your main website.
• Strategies to prevent page abandonment due to a declined transaction.
• Increased conversions through A/B split testing on layout and design elements.
• Dynamic display of payment methods, depending on user preferences and geography.
• Compatibility and uniformity across all channels.

Customer payment behaviour has changed rapidly over the past few years, with COVID-19 restrictions accelerating the move towards exclusively digital forms of payment. Today's consumers demand fast, simple and increasingly mobile-orientated forms of payment, so it's vitally important that your business offers a seamless shopping experience across multiple channels.

Even if you're a bricks-and-mortar business adapting to the rapidly changing payments landscape, there are still plenty of ways of accepting payments online without a website, allowing you to scale your business rapidly and expand into new markets.

Ecommpay can help you reduce operational costs and scale faster with a wide selection of payment options, from global acquiring to local bank payments and e-wallets. Get in touch with our expert team to learn more!