There are around 24 million e-commerce websites running worldwide, why should people choose you, especially when it involves monetary transactions? It is not easy to gain a customer’s trust to make a payment on your platform. If you are getting orders that means you have made your portal in a way that a visitor can trust and buy something from your website. However, if your visitors are finishing the game right before paying, possibly this could mean you need to work on your features of payment gateways.
What Is A ‘Payment Gateway’?
A self-explanatory term which means a merchant service to authorise, process, and receive payments through credit card or other direct payment options for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and clicks, or traditional brick and mortar.
Now let’s discuss how to win customers’ trust for taking payment on your website.
Steps To Set Up Payment Gateway & How To Accept Payments Online
(i) Open Merchant Account
A merchant account is a kind of business account that accepts payments from multiple modes such as credit cards, debit cards and other payment modes.
If you need a payment gateway, you will have to open a merchant account as it is the destination of your payments. Firstly, the payment goes to your merchant account then after all processing formalities, it goes to your bank account.
(ii) Develop Or Integrate A Payment Gateway
At this stage, you have to choose whether you want to develop your own payment gateway or integrate with an existing one.
Plan to create your own payment gateway if you have a large scale business that accepts a huge number of payments daily and a per-transaction fee seems a big expense.
On either side, if you opt for integrating with the existing PSP, you will have to choose from the options available in the market.
You can make up your mind by considering the following factors:
- International payment acceptance
- Transaction fee
- Data security
- Transactions effectiveness
- Easy checkouts
- Allow paying from multiple modes of payment
Essential Features Of Accepting Payments On Your Website
1) Multiple Login Options
When a visitor comes to your website for the first time, they may not feel safe and convenient to create an account before getting the satisfaction that your website is safe to provide information and have good stuff to explore. Therefore, allow them to explore your website first, and let them proceed to the checkout page (payment page). There you may ask them to create an account and make the final payment.
2) Authentication Layers
Many times customers forget their login credentials. When they try to recover their account, you should have layers of authentication to authenticate the customer’s identity.
The layers could be OTP generation on both email ID and phone, series of personal questions, PIN verification and asking for the last password they remember. It prevents customer account hacking and builds customers’ trust in you.
3) PCI Compliance
The PCI Security Standards Council has a series of Data Security Standards (DSS) that are similar for all merchants irrespective of the volume of transactions.
Being an owner of an e-commerce website, it is your responsibility to ensure a certain level of PCI compliance is followed based on the number of transactions over a period of 12-months. Most of the SaaS shopping carts have in-built PCI compliances. Check SaaS shopping carts before opting for one.
4) Integrated Payment Processor
If you are new to the business and using an existing payment gateway. Make sure that you integrate it on your website and the customer should not be redirected to another (payment service provider) PSP website.
It will impact the customer’s user experience and overall image of the website. It could develop second thoughts for safety in the customer’s mind perhaps affect the transaction’s possibility too.
5) SSL Certificate
A standard security technology that makes sure that passed information stays private between the web server and a browser. It is a certificate that ensures the security of customers’ financial information such as credit card and debit card information.
An e-commerce website must have an SSL certificate before placing a payment gateway. Customers can check the integration of the certificate as the website will have “HTTPS://” at the beginning of a URL rather than “HTTP://”.
6) Well-Informed Confirmation Page Before Checkout
Everything is dependent on the user experience that involves both convenience and assurance.
Before proceeding to a final checkout page, give time to the customer to review their cart, address, mobile number and other information that is essential for a smooth order and delivery experience.
In any case, if they forget to add/delete any product or they want to change some information. They might cancel the order and may not re-order it due to any reason.
7) Contact Information
In the era where hackers and scammers are doing well and becoming more sophisticated in their work. It is difficult to make someone believe that you are genuinely working to serve the customer in the return of some profits, nothing else.
Adding contact information on the checkout page could develop more trust in your website if you seem to be more accessible in case of any returns or queries.
Conclusion
In the era of online shopping, it has become essential for an e-commerce website owner to gain customers’ trust which is required to take payments on your website.
By saying that, you need to have essential features of payment gateway on your website such as multiple layers of authentication, secured payment gateway, customer information security, etc. For more information on e-commerce websites, keep following our technology-related articles.