With more ways than ever to enable an online storefront, your options for doing so may seem a little convoluted and overwhelming. In this article, we’ll explain some key components that may not be on your radar when searching for the best payment processing solution for your business.
With the ecommerce industry continuing to grow and evolve at rapid rates year after year, there has never been a better time to start breaking into the market than now. Whether you’re a small, medium, large, B2B or B2C business – there are payment processing options catered specifically to your unique needs, niche, and business objectives.
Challenges may rise, however, when you start to analyze some of the different providers out there, and comprehend the various features they offer and rates they charge. There are lots of considerations in this regard: Does it need to be set up as quickly as possible? Are you looking for an intuitive user interface? Do detailed analytics matter? Are you comfortable paying an implementation fee? How about a flat monthly subscription? Would you be better suited having a portion of each sale pay out to the platform as a small fee?
Clearly, there are many things to think about when it comes to ecommerce enablement, but there are also some lesser known elements that may not immediately come to mind or may not even seem obvious during the selection process. With that in mind, we’ve taken some time to lay some of those out for you.
Before we dive any deeper, it’s important to understand payment gateways and how a traditional gateway functions compared to a modern one. A payment gateway securely transfers credit card data from an ecommerce website to a credit card payment network for processing, which then returns the transaction response back to the website.
This relationship can be handled in two ways – via a traditional process or a modern one. Activating a traditional payment gateway is a lengthy process that requires you to directly sign up for a merchant account, whereas its modern counterpart has already established that relationship, saving you the time and effort that goes into securing that yourself.
This article will specifically focus on modern payment gateways. If you’re interested in learning more about setting up a traditional one – which certainly has its benefits despite the arduous commitment – you can do so here.
