Choosing a payment gateway
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Revision date: 31 Jan 2006
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A payment gateway is an essential part of your online strategy. Popular shopping cart software such as X-Cart is compatible with a great variety of payment systems widely known as payment gateways. But how can you choose the one that's right for you? You do not have the luxury of rectifying a wrong decision. Apart from the cost of the service, you stand to lose out much more - customers, orders, fraud related losses, integration time, time to market etc.
On the stage of
getting your online store live, you will likely face the problem of
accepting credit cards from your customers. It's the most common and
convenient payment method available over the Internet and ignoring it
results in losing many of your potential customers. The possible
solutions are processing credit cards manually through the virtual terminal or subscription for the service of a payment gateway
which will process credit cards for you. Among such companies the most
famous are Authorize.NET, PayPal, WorldPay, 2CheckOut and several
others.
Pros and cons
What are the good and weak sides of each variant?
While
processing orders manually you don't have to pay for payment gateway
service. You can process the orders at any time suitable for you,
accept credit cards by phone, fax, etc.
However, there are several significant benefits when using the payment gateway service:
- Most
of payment gateways have a sophisticated fraud protection mechanism
which helps to avoid most of chargebacks from the customers whose
credit card might have been stolen by hackers.
- The process is fully automated so you can save vast amount of time if you have many orders.
- Some
payment gateways like 2CheckOut allow you to accept credit cards even
if you do not have internet merchant account (it may be difficult to
obtain a merchant account if you have just started the business and
haven't got positive credit history yet).
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Revision date: 31 Jan 2006
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