What to Look for While Choosing a Payment Gateway
It is an undisputed fact that India is amongst the largest and fastest growing e-commerce market. Industry experts predict retail e-commerce sales to grow at CAGR of 23 percent during the period from 2016-2021. In 2016, 69 million Indians shopped online with sale of physical goods via digital channels amounting to $16.07 billion. So, as hoards of merchants go online and virtual sales start ticking simple, efficient and secure payment processing, will play key role in success of online business. Therefore choice of payment gateway assumes great strategic importance. What features should drive this choice?High Uptime & Success Ratio
Any downtime be it your online portal, market place or Payment Gateway will adversely affect your business. Today’s discerning consumers expect instant payment processing once they hit the ‘pay’ button. It is therefore of paramount importance that Payment Gateway service provider commit to very high levels of uptime. This will ensure that consumers can avail services/make purchases uninterrupted on 24x7x365 basis.
However, in real world, there are technical hitches as result of which transactions cannot be processed. Before selecting a Payment Gateway check the success ratio. Smooth integration with merchant, optimized checkout, intelligent routing help in achieve high success ratio.
Fast, Easy & Friendly Checkout
A good Payment Gateway makes checkout fast, easy, and friendly. A clean, well-designed UI reduces purchasing time for consumers and helps reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. A better all-round experience also helps drives repeat business.
Multiple Payment Option
Merchants must ensure that their Payment Gateway gives consumers multiple digital payment options. Indian consumer is still only feeling his way into the cashless world so choices are only also evolving. Apart from credit and debit cards and net banking, digital wallets are popular with consumers. UPI and Bharat QR are emerging payment options which will soon gain acceptance from consumer. Merchants must understand the preferred payment methods of target market and choose a payment gateway with supports these methods. If your website doesn't accept your customer's preferred payment method, you will lose sales.
Security
Consumers, overseas as well as in India, still tend to be somewhat concerned about online transactions. If a company aims to gain market share, it must acquire consumer trust. This trust is at the core of long term relationship building. Therefore big or small, online merchants cannot afford to falter on aspects that could impact consumer confidence. PCI DSS compliance, data encryption of sensitive payment data, real time fraud detection are core features of a secure Payment Gateway.
End-to-end Offering
As a merchant, it would be great if your Payment Gateway allows for both payment processing and settlement to the bank. This would allow you to dispense with having a special bank account just to receive the payments coming in from your Payment Gateway - a benefit given that merchant accounts tend to be harder to set up some times.
Additionally, your Payment Gateway service provider should support single consolidated settlement to one account or automatic multi account settlement depending upon the nature of the payment. Such multi account settlements are a boon to merchants as they do away tedious and error prone manual transfer which merchants would have otherwise done as per business requirements.
Integration
When choosing a Payment Gateway, merchants should opt for a payment gateway, which provides APIs to integrate with merchant systems. Often merchants require payment notifications to their internal systems such as billing or delivery application. Such integrations help make business more efficient and reduce manual intervention.
Reporting
Reporting is another key consideration. Payment Gateway should provide a range of reports such as basic reports on daily transaction MIS (successful and unsuccessful) to specialized reports such as preferred payment mode, settlement report, unsettled transactions etc. Reports on commission charged to platform usage costs give detailed information to merchant.
Fees
Understanding the fees charged by your Payment Gateway provider is important. There are varying fee plans to choose from - fixed to variable, one time set up and monthly recurring, special fees for charge back handling etc. Merchant must be vary of any hidden charges such as zero set up cost but very high transaction processing fees.
'Omni' Capabilities
Today consumers have a lot of choice to make their purchases and payments. Consumers may opt for in person purchase and payment, remote purchase and remote payment, remote purchase and on-delivery in person payments. Consumer’s payment mode may also vary depending upon the use case. Therefore, these days’ Payment Gateways need to be ‘Omni’ in nature. Omni-channels such as online, in-person or on the go, and Omni payment modes such as cards, net banking, wallets, UPI, and BharatQR.
Such ‘Omni Payment Gateway platforms have the capability to provide complete digital payments foot print of a consumer which can be leveraged by merchants to engage better with their consumers and rollout personalized promotions and finance schemes.
Consumers, overseas as well as in India, still tend to be somewhat concerned about online transactions. If a company aims to gain market share, it must acquire consumer trust. This trust is at the core of long term relationship building. Therefore big or small, online merchants cannot afford to falter on aspects that could impact consumer confidence. PCI DSS compliance, data encryption of sensitive payment data, real time fraud detection are core features of a secure Payment Gateway.
Omni Payment Gateway platforms have the capability to provide complete digital payments foot print of a consumer which can be leveraged by merchants to engage better with their consumers
End-to-end Offering
As a merchant, it would be great if your Payment Gateway allows for both payment processing and settlement to the bank. This would allow you to dispense with having a special bank account just to receive the payments coming in from your Payment Gateway - a benefit given that merchant accounts tend to be harder to set up some times.
Additionally, your Payment Gateway service provider should support single consolidated settlement to one account or automatic multi account settlement depending upon the nature of the payment. Such multi account settlements are a boon to merchants as they do away tedious and error prone manual transfer which merchants would have otherwise done as per business requirements.
Integration
When choosing a Payment Gateway, merchants should opt for a payment gateway, which provides APIs to integrate with merchant systems. Often merchants require payment notifications to their internal systems such as billing or delivery application. Such integrations help make business more efficient and reduce manual intervention.
Reporting
Reporting is another key consideration. Payment Gateway should provide a range of reports such as basic reports on daily transaction MIS (successful and unsuccessful) to specialized reports such as preferred payment mode, settlement report, unsettled transactions etc. Reports on commission charged to platform usage costs give detailed information to merchant.
Fees
Understanding the fees charged by your Payment Gateway provider is important. There are varying fee plans to choose from - fixed to variable, one time set up and monthly recurring, special fees for charge back handling etc. Merchant must be vary of any hidden charges such as zero set up cost but very high transaction processing fees.
'Omni' Capabilities
Today consumers have a lot of choice to make their purchases and payments. Consumers may opt for in person purchase and payment, remote purchase and remote payment, remote purchase and on-delivery in person payments. Consumer’s payment mode may also vary depending upon the use case. Therefore, these days’ Payment Gateways need to be ‘Omni’ in nature. Omni-channels such as online, in-person or on the go, and Omni payment modes such as cards, net banking, wallets, UPI, and BharatQR.
Such ‘Omni Payment Gateway platforms have the capability to provide complete digital payments foot print of a consumer which can be leveraged by merchants to engage better with their consumers and rollout personalized promotions and finance schemes.
