To choose the best payment solution for your business, you first need to focus on all the stakeholders. In every payment process, three parties are involved: the merchant, the customer and the technologies that connect them.
One of the technologies is the payment gateway, which is a service that authorizes and processes payments in physical stores and online. A gateway serves as a portal to facilitate the flow of transactions between customers and merchants. The payment solution chosen must therefore meet the needs of both your customers and your business. The moment of payment is a crucial step in the customer journey, before choosing the ideal solution for your business; it is advisable to take into account the following seven factors:
The Locations Covered and the Means of Payment Accepted
Whether you have brick-and-mortar stores across the world or an e-commerce site with international customers, payment providers should offer multiple features, depending on your needs. For example, if you need to market your products and services globally, your payment gateway should provide a comprehensive solution, accept the most popular payment methods in your target markets, and most importantly, support multiple currencies. In e-commerce, according to a experts study, 50% of visitors will abandon their shopping carts if they cannot find their preferred payment method. Therefore, to better serve your customers, you need to offer them the most suitable payment methods for your target country.
If you are looking for a way to improve trust as well as your conversion rate, integrating our payment solution will instill confidence in your customers, improve their purchase journey and protect you against fraudulent actions. Medius is constantly improving its services so that its merchants can provide the best payment experience to their customers.
Payment gateways also affect your efficiency. Make sure you know if your service provider supports all the types of collection that you want to integrate into your physical or e-commerce store (TPE, Paybylink, QR code, integration into the cash register software).
Ease of Integration
This part mainly concerns the online store; the integration of a means of payment on its e-commerce site can be done via API integration or via plugins on a CMS such as Woo Commerce. Most payment solution provider’s offer detailed documentation on their API that allows you to integrate the desired payment methods into your e-commerce site.
The key factor to consider when integrating a payment solution into your e-commerce is therefore its ease of integration. In addition, it is important to choose a solution that will not make your payment process long and tedious. According to invespcro.com, over 23% of customers abandon their carts due to a complex checkout process. So choose a payment interface that will not destroy your efforts in user experience and that will allow your customers to make payments as easily as possible on your e-commerce site by choosing the payment method of their choice.
Security
Large groups have set the bar higher in terms of customer experience by optimizing their customer journey at point of sale and online, but also by making safety their priority. Customer expectations have therefore increased.
Even if you are a small business, your customers will still expect a very secure payment process and a very high quality experience. If you sell online, you are directly or indirectly competing with groups like Amazon, EBay, etc. In other words, your checkout process should be as secure as that of e-commerce giants. Make sure your payment solution provider is certified to follow information security standards like PCI-DSS and offers 3D secure authentication, for example.
Customer Support
Many payment gateways limit their customer support to emails, help forms, or even an FAQ where customers are supposed to find all the answers to their questions. In this case, the users must follow, independently, and manually all the steps to resolve their technical problems. In case you prefer human interaction or live support, it is better to favor providers who can be available immediately and at any time by phone or in live chat, at least during working hours so that they can assist you in solving your problems as quickly as possible.
Make sure that the payment methods you want to integrate are accepted by the payment gateway chosen on your type of store (physical store or e-commerce site). Some payment solution providers offer their services for both the physical store and for e-commerce. However, it is not uncommon for a payment method to be available only for one of the two.
