The modern consumer wants to have a hassle-free shopping experience throughout the process. When checkout is frustrating due to your payment gateway, you will lose sales to abandoned carts within a few seconds.
On the other hand, the right payment partner efficiently handles your transactions, allowing you to focus on your business and your customers. This is why the selection of a payment gateway and a hosting solution is not only a technical choice. It is a strategic one, and your selection criteria must be wide enough to cover the following.
Calculate the fees
All payment gateways have fees. But they don’t all charge similarly. Some charge a percentage of every sale, and others impose an additional transaction fee. Some of them also charge monthly or setup fees.
Do your calculations before you commit. Ask yourself: How much will this cost me when I grow from 10 orders to 1000 orders a month? The right online payment gateway will scale with you without consuming your margins. Also high-risk payment gateways for example adult industry, does provide low transactions fees if you find the right adult payment gateway.
On the hosting side, consider more than what is advertised as a monthly price. Some plans are cheap but may restrict bandwidth or storage, and you will upgrade to expensive plans as your store expands. Be sure to see the whole picture before you join.
Check the supported payment methods
Your customers demand alternatives. You must at least have your gateway accommodate the major credit and debit cards. Depending on your market, you might require options like:
- PayPal
- Apple Pay
- Google Pay
- Buy now, pay later options.
Do you have international customers? In that case, ensure that your gateway supports a variety of currencies and local payment systems.
Check speed and performance
Delays at the checkout counter or a slow site would cost you sales immediately. A good hosting provider must have good:
- Load times
- Good uptime
- Resources that can be scaled.
In the case of a payment gateway, consider the speed of processing. The faster the payments are approved, the more convenient the experience is to your customers.
Hosted and non-hosted gateways
When using a hosted gateway, the customers are redirected to a third party where they are asked to input their payment details (think PayPal). In the case of a non-hosted gateway, a payment is made on your site.
Best hosting providers solutions are less complicated to install and can frequently help with much of the security and compliance on your behalf. But they may disrupt the shopping process.
Non-hosted gateways are more seamless, but need more effort on your part to ensure everything is secure. The correct decision is determined by:
- Your technical level of comfort
- The extent of control that you desire in the checkout process.
Look for easy integration
Ensure that the payment gateway is compatible with your e-commerce platform. On the same note, find a hosting company with:
- One-click installations
- Easy dashboards
- Customer support.
The more seamless it is, the better.
Security and compliance
Last but not least, everything in e-commerce is trust. Customers will not purchase unless they are sure that they are safe. You need a PCI DSS-compliant payment gateway that is strongly encrypted. This is the gold standard for handling card data. The hosting companies ought to provide the SSL certificates, periodic backups, and security checkups.