Considerations for Choosing a Secure Payment Gateway
Once you know what to expect from a payment gateway, it helps to narrow the focus to how to select your payment gateway of choice.
You won’t have any problems finding a mainstream payment gateway that makes your shopping carts convenient, so let’s focus on security.
According to Experian, 27% of customers report abandoning a cart simply due to a lack of visible security.
To ensure that you’re working with a secure payment gateway, ask the following questions:
1. What payments do your customers use?
It’s one of the fundamental questions you need to ask: what are your customers already using to handle their payments?
If you stack your payment gateways and facilitate a payment type they can use, you’ll run into fewer problems and run fewer security risks.
2. What is the fee from the payment gateway?
The costs of ecommerce fraud can add to your bottom line.
That means that if a payment gateway’s lower costs are outweighed by the money you spend on additional security concerns and fraud detection, it might not be worth that investment.
Consider the fee of your payment gateway and how it relates to your security costs. Our list above quoted the prices of seven of the major payment gateway providers.
3. How secure is their encryption?
To be sure, you’ll want to work with PCI compliant companies.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a system of standards put in place to uphold security provisions for the electronic world.
Before you pull the trigger on any one gateway, double-check that they maintain PCI compliance. These are standards put in place to protect customer data and payment information.
For example, if you were weighing using PayPal as your payment gateway of choice, you would discover that their solution is PCI compliant, which should give you confidence in the sophistication of their encrypting process.
4. What is their reputation?
If over a quarter of customers want to see visible security marks at the point of checkout, you’ll have to use a payment gateway that they trust. Consider that a Verisign seal once helped BlueFountainMedia increase its form fills by more than 40%.
If you want to prevent customers from abandoning their carts, avoid sketchy payment gateways.
Instead, focus on large payment gateway providers with established reputations, such as Amazon Pay, PayPal, and Apple Pay.
This brand recognition works in your favor by highlighting your security and encouraging a customer to continue shopping.
Opening Your Payment Gateway for Business
Once you understand the importance of a payment gateway and its impact on your sales and security, it’s time to take the next steps:
- Research with key priorities in mind. Check the PCI compliance of your potential payment solution to ensure its security, and always look for per-transaction prices to get a sense of how a gateway will impact your bottom line.
- Understand what your customers want. Even if you don’t have a payment gateway, there are insights you may already have that you need to leverage. Which payment services do your customers prefer, and what’s the most convenient way to facilitate these preferences?
- Stack multiple gateways to fill gaps. You don’t have to commit to one gateway for the rest of your days. You can even stack multiple gateways at once to ensure maximum coverage for most customer needs.
“Invest in tools/partners that don’t store credit card information inside of your business, let alone even pass that data through your platform. Choose a gateway that provides a front and back-end API that sends card data directly to them and shares only secure token data back.” — Adam Grohs, Co-Founder/CEO, Particular.
With a better knowledge of price, function, and gateway security, your business will be in the position to choose the right option for your business needs and add a new level of security (and peace of mind) that customers need when making a purchase online.