The world is speeding up, and consumer’s appetites for online shopping aren’t going away any time soon. Traditional brick-and-mortar shops will continue to face pressure from their online counterparts. Luckily, with all of the tools available today, setting up an ecommerce site doesn’t require an advanced degree.
Online store building platforms like Shopify make it easy to list your products on the internet for customers to browse. To market your products, you can use platforms like Campaign Monitor to send out rich and engaging email campaigns. The final step will be to make it possible for customers to make purchases online. Read on to discover more about online payment gateways and how to best ensure they benefit your shop.
What are online payment gateways and why do ecommerce sites depend on them?
Online payment gateways allow ecommerce sites to process payments just like a Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal. It’s a secure way to make payments between a buyer and a seller for online shops.
What a payment gateway does
A payment gateway handles secure transactions over the internet. Just like a PoS terminal, it transfers information from a credit or debit card to the issuer. The issuer then authorizes the transaction and releases the payment to the seller’s account.
For a payment gateway to remain secure, it encrypts all the information before sending it over the internet. With more people shopping online, it became critical to ensure all financial information remains protected at every step in the process. This led to new standards and regulations that control how the payment gateways of today work.
By 2021, there’ll be an estimated 2.14 billion digital buyers around the world.
Source: Statista
Benefits of online payment gateways
The latest online payment gateways come with a string of benefits. Keep in mind that, just like regular credit and debit transactions, it’s not free. For every transaction, there’ll be some form of fee. Some vendors will charge more than others will, so which one to choose will depend on the type of online shop you’re running.
Some of the benefits you get from an online payment gateway include:
- Fast and easy transaction processing.
- Secure transfer of money between buyers and sellers.
- Support for multiple types of issuers (or banks).
- Comes bundled with other ecommerce tools like shopping carts.
- Process payments at any time of day.
How to measure the success of an online payment gateway
Adding a payment gateway to your online store brings many benefits, but you’ll need to ensure your customers aren’t struggling to use it. If you notice your customers are abandoning carts, it could point to an issue with your payment gateway. For the best results, compare different gateways for ease of use and always keep the customer’s experience in mind.
Does it really matter?
Customers now expect to do their shopping online or in person, according to their own whims. A regular retail store may list their products online, but not enable customers to make a purchase. This will lead to a lost opportunity for making additional revenue.
Adding a payment gateway to your website will ensure you retain customers, whether they shop online or at a retail outlet.
What now?
Payment gateways make it easy to process transactions online. They provide a secure way for retailers to extend their services onto an ecommerce platform. You should remember that not all payment gateways are equal, so researching which one is right for you will be important.
With all this new information about online payment gateways, why not read this post on designing better customer journeys to further help reach your sales goals?