An Overview Of Online Payment Processing Methods For Your Business

Making it as easy as possible for customers and clients to pay increases our chances of getting the cash,  improves cashflow and reduces all the admin burden of dealing with payments. Online payments are no longer purely the reserve of online retail, we’re now seeing service based businesses beginning to take advantage of the benefits of processing payments online. This means the long, drawn out processes of bank visits to pay in should hopefully be a thing of the past and businesses are able to get their payments dealt with efficiently and effectively.

Payment Gateway V Merchant Account

The methods can be mainly split into these two main categories. A merchant account is an online account that holds the money temporarily until it gets Have a creepy-crawly(2)transferred into your full bank account, whereas a payment gateway facilitates the transfer of money from your customers account to yours. Merchant accounts often offer more flexibility in taking payments through other means such over the phone or in person. The merchant accounts can be easier to get started with as there are less implications around payment security.

What Type Of Payments Does Your Business Do?

Reoccurring Payments

If all your clients are reoccurring payments on a monthly basis. Then for us it is a two horse race between two relative new players in the payment processing market – Stripe and Go Cardless. With a sleek interface and easy integration options, Go Cardless is easy to get up and running on your site and the cheapest as it’s system is built purely for Direct Debits. This means it has slightly less flexibility than Stripe, which is a relatively new platform with flexibility and competitive pricing.

Both methods can take slightly longer to deliver the cash into your bankGC-landscape-blue than some of the bigger names such as Sage Pay or PayPal who also both handle direct debits though at a slightly higher cost.

Payment Gateway Integration

The leading names in this area are Worldpay, Sage Pay, and PayPal. The comparisons here can get quite complicated as they all generally have a monthly fee of around £18-30 a month, plus a percentage on the sales which often depends on the type of payment method and the amount of transactions per month. These methods will usually get the payment into your account much quicker and at lower cost for higher transactions. The costs for the big players in this area are all very similar and so choosing which of these methods is right for your business, can involve quite in depth calculations.

There are many more factors need to be considered when going with this type of integration. If the payment details are entered onto your website (even though they won’t be stored by you or your website)  an extremely high level of security is needed to ensure that the payment information is transferred securely from your website to the payment provider. This means ensuring your website is “SSL secured” and also should mean ensuring your secure is PCI DSS compliant. These factors depend on hosting as well as the onsite factors.

paymentbrain-400x56-9b25d919128d3e17c93d6d3ef4d9f0fcab841e8b0d6a929b4819dae5e821b9caWe recommend Payment Brain as a great way to get an idea on monthly costs by enabling you to compare between the different providers by entering estimated average transaction amount and anticipated monthly sales. There are other variables this doesn’t account for but is a good starting point for finding the right one for your level.

Pay By Link

Sending customers a link with an option to make the payment on a third party site – often branded to your company, is a quick way to process payments online without the hassle of direct integration into your site. There are some great options of providers in this area such as WorldPay and Cardsave. This is also something that many accountancy software include as part of their features. So that your customers can receive a link to go to a page on a third party website and make the payment, which then gets transferred to you.

“Pay With..” methods

Amazon Pay and PayPal enable you to have a button directly on your website that lets your customers login to either their PayPal or Amazon accounts and make the payment to you through these. It allows you to leverage the trust of the behemoths of the online payments industry whilst also meaning it should be quick for customers to pay by logging into an account that already has all their payment details ready to go. The cost of these methods can be relatively high and there’s less flexibility as Amazon can’t handle ongoing payments.

Both are great options for a quick and easy way to get payments for smaller amounts, and easy to get up and running to accept payments online. Apple Pay and Android Pay have recently hit the market to much fanfare and they fall into these categories. As businesses, these are really easy to work with and make it very easy for customers to make the payments using methods they trust. This is great for the B2C market or B2B market, but may have disadvantages working with larger businesses who may not have accounts registered in the business name.

All businesses need to be looking at how they can get the money in easier and taking advantages of some of these exciting new developments should allow them to do so.

Neil Haffenden
The E-Commerce Workroom

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