
How To Choose a Payment Gateway for Your Online Business
If you intent to open an online store, to monetize your blog or to process transactions on your website, at some point you will have to choose a payment gateway.
What is a payment gateway?
A payment gateway is an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes credit card payments for e-businesses. There are hundreds of payment gateways in the world, so choosing the right one for your business can be a daunting task. Most hosted e-commerce solutions and shopping cart WordPress plugins integrate a payment gateway like Paypal and Stripe. But if you want to choose the payment gateway yourself, this infographic will help you make a decision based on the features to consider.
How does a payment gateway work?
Here is how a typical transaction process goes:
- The customer places an order on your website and clicks ‘Order’
- Your website forwards the transaction details to the payment gateway
- The payment gateway forwards the transaction information to the payment processor used by your acquiring bank
- The payment processor forwards the transaction information to the card association (Visa, Mastercard or other)
- The credit card issuing bank receives the authorization request and does fraud and credit or debit checks and then sends a response back to the processor
- The processor forwards the authorization response to the payment gateway
- The payment gateway receives the response, and forwards it on to the website
- Your website then fulfills the order
Factors to consider when choosing a payment gateway
- Recurring billing
- Mobile payments
- Fees
- Currencies
- Infographic key
- On-site payments
- Payment types available
- Country availability
- Cutomer support
- Fraud protection
For details about each feature, take a look at the infographic below, designed by CueCommerce.