How to choose a payment gateway for WooCommerce

Choosing the right payment gateway for your WooCommerce store is vital to maximize your customer experience and drive more sales. Since this is a pivotal decision that can directly influence your online sales, you need to take a moment, do your research before arriving at any decision.

Read on about payment gateways, how it works, and the factors that can help you choose the right one.

What is a Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway is a service that processes online payments at the final stage of an online purchase. To make this happen, the credit/debit card information is transmitted to the store and finally to the bank.

It also accepts or rejects a transaction, with your store account before the amount is deposited into your bank account. If the transaction is acceptable, the payment amount is deducted from the customer’s account and deposited in your store account.

Considering its role, payment gateways can also be called Payment Service Providers.

How Does a Payment Gateway for WooCommerce Work?

The operations of the payment gateway starts with passing the payment through your store’s server and then transferring its payment portal to the issuing bank. It then asks for confirmation. The payment authorization request is either accepted or rejected based on the bank’s response. This is conveyed to the store server which then permits or restricts the customer to proceed with the purchase.

Wondering how long these steps will take? All this happens within seconds!

Choosing the right payment gateway for WooCommerce

It is important to choose the right payment gateway for your wooCommerce store as it largely affects the seamless checkout options for customers which is a crucial factor that determines sales.

Let’s check out some of the important points to keep in my mind while setting up the WooCommerce payment gateways:

• Security and PCI Compliance: online payments include handling sensitive information and this needs to be secured. To ensure this, you can obtain an SSL certificate for PCI Compliance. If you do not have one, then redirect the customer to the payment page and then redirect them back while processing the payment.
• Cost: consider if the transaction charges are bearable
• Subscriptions: take into consideration that subscriptions might need periodic renewal
• Multiple locations and Currency support: you might want to look for payment gateways that support multiple currencies if you have a wider location. Some of the premium payment gateway plugins are suitable for this.

Hosted vs. integrated gateways

Hosted gateways take your customers to the payment site. Once they complete the payment, the customer is redirected to the store page. This method is hassle-free as it does not require PCI compliance and is free from data security concerns. However, some customers do not prefer leaving the site to offsite payment pages due to trust issues.

Integrated gateways on the other hand offer a seamless experience for making payments. Although the experience is smooth and uncomplicated, PCI-DSS compliance is a must for this in order to ensure data security.

International payments and local payments

Do your research and be sure about the charges that incur upon domestic and international transactions done in your store. You must also consider the credit card transaction charges in this regard.

Billing and customer support

Trustable billing and customer support is important when it comes to payments and refunds. You should handle the customers diplomatically if there is a charge for refunds or even while processing payments. Hence, selecting a gateway with a responsive and proactive support team is also of paramount importance.

To sum up, while adding a payment gateway to the store, extra caution is necessary as it greatly influences the trust and security of the customer which is hard to earn.

Hope this helps in your search for the best payment gateway for WooCommerce.