The E-commerce industry has evolved as a growing yet revolutionary industry. Yes, it has revolutionised the way of doing business or providing services. Online market has no doubt contributed to the change in people’s lifestyle and buying habits.
Despite the Increasing number of online buyers, people are still on guard of the setbacks of making payments online. In particular, people still get nervous about giving their personal and credit card information to online merchants. An e-commerce business would be successful in creating an impact on the society only when they will be able to provide them with a stable, reliable, secure, and smooth online shopping experience. And all of That starts with creating your own secured payment gateway.
How to Create a Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is basically the technology of payment processing that bridges the gap between the customer and the acquirer during a transaction. Keeping it simple, it helps to know how payment processing works.
Steps of processing payments online:
- Customer makes a purchase
- PSP accepts the purchase data
- Merchant receives the data
- Their bank approves the purchase
- PSP sends data to the gateway
- Merchant accepts the payment.
In simple words, a payment gateway acts as an intermediary between the customer and the merchant, ensuring the transaction is carried out in a prompt and secured manner.
Here’s how to set it up!
- Open a merchant account: A merchant account is a kind of business account that accepts payments of manifold types, including direct transfer, credit cards etc. Any transaction made, first lands into the merchants account for further processing and only after that they’ll be able to transfer the funds into their respective business banking accounts.
In order to create a payment gateway, it helps in setting up a merchant account already, as it will be the final destination for all the payments received after every successful transaction made on the website. - Select on a payment service provider (PSP): While the gateway acts as the foreground of payment processing for a transaction or we can say the interface that the customers directly interact with, on the other hand the payment service provider (PSP) facilitates the transaction on the back end, passing financial information across all the moving parts. In order to create a payment gateway one must first set up a PSP to hook it up to.
- Build your own or buy your payment gateway? The merchants are free to decide whether they want to build their own payment gateway or buy your payment gateway services. Customized builts lead to individual specifications and add a wider range of your unique needs and also saves on transaction fees. However, it may cost to develop and maintain the account accordingly.
Top payment gateway providers in the industry include Paystudio, Authorize.Net, Stripe, and PayPal.
If you are planning to take payments on your website, then be sure of the following basic fundamentals explained below:
- Various login alternatives: Creating an account before placing an order might be more convenient for the merchant but it doesn’t always benefit the customers. If there is no option to check out as a guest, we might lose the customer. Note- You can ask them to create an account once they’ve placed an order and feel more comfortable with your brand.
One should also think about offering shoppers the option of logging in with one of their social media profiles, like Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter. This can even reduce registration friction as it makes the login process a lot convenient and speedy as well. - Substantiation/Login Layers: The customers who have not created an account must be provided with the assurity that their information is safe with our website even if they forget their login information. The assurance can be provided by making sure of several verification layers before one tries to restore their login information. For instance, if a customer has forgotten the password, your site must redirect them to various security questions or by sending a verification mail to the added email address.
- PCI Adherence: The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) lays down a series of specific Data Security Standards (DSS) that are applicable to all merchants, regardless of revenue and credit card transaction volumes. If you host and manage your own ecommerce platform, it’s your responsibility to ensure PCI compliance at the required compliance level, which is based on credit or debit card transactions over a year.
- Integrated Payment Processor: Being a low risk merchant or having a low number of transactions you can get away with payment processors like Paypal, Stripe, Googlepay, Amazonpay etc. It’s recommended to consolidate a payment processor directly into your website. Under this, the customer gets redirected from your website to a pay site that doesn’t look like yours, which may lead to confusion and disrupting experience or can visually disconnect the customer from your brand. For a high risk merchant, the best payment gateway solution is the most which provides best security and makes payments simple for the merchant and their customers.
- SSL Certification: Every e-commerce website needs to have a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certification to protect the customers payment information. Without an SSL, the customers information is not safe, the hackers can steal the information and eventually the customers won’t feel safe while submitting the payment information or even accessing the website.
- Credit Card Logos and Security Seals: Keeping the customer at ease and assured that your site is secure and a trusted platform. The merchant must add credit card logos and security seals at your website. It must be visible in the shopping cart and checkout pages of the site.
- Checkout Buttons: The checkout buttons are recommended to be easy and efficient to call to action as less unproductive movements a customer will face will accessing your website the sooner they’ll take action and buy. The option is recommended to be in a color that easily stands out or can be at the top or bottom of your webpage.
- Perceptible Checkout Process: The website must give customers a visual indicator of how far the order has progressed and how far they still have to go.
- Return & Refund Policy: As the market is online there is no tangible feel of the product which does make the customer feel a bit nervous and hold back to place an order. To attenuate this, there must be a return and refund policy laid in the interest of the customer. One must provide this information on the Checkout process and or in footer of the website.
One must make sure that the policy is Informative, engaging, understandable, and in the interest of the customer. There must be a clear policy laid down mentioning the terms and conditions, like the customer will get a refund or an in-store credit, set down a time frame for returns, disclose any fees up front etc. - Limpid trail to the Contact details: Online shoppers want to know they can easily reach your company for support — especially if they’re first-time customers. If you don’t give them a clear path to your contact information, they may either hesitate to buy from you, or they may not get the support they need to complete a transaction.
Include contact information like a phone number (with availability hours), email address, street address, and social media accounts. Preferably, list this information as text (not as an image) so it’ll get picked up by search engines in local searches. Some retailers also like to offer live chat options — just be sure that you’ve integrated it with your customer records so you can build smarter marketing campaigns in the future. - Detailed Confirmation Page Before Checkout: Before allowing the customer to check out from your website, an ideal website must offer a detailed confirmation page before finishing the transaction. This page should let them review their order, providing them with an option to add or remove the items, flashing the final price to be paid including the tax and shipping charges and also the expected date of delivery.
- Optimized Checkout Page motif: The best checkout page is considered to be easily functional, secure, attractive, and easy to use and navigate. This can be a turnoff for the customer if they’re not able to use the system provided or they may even lose faith in it.
- Transactions through mobile: The payment gateway must be accessible and convenient to use for mobile users as well. If your website also has a mobile application, you would require additional functionality to process payments for IOS and Android users.
- Email confirmation: Finally, a confirmation email should be provided to the customer which includes the order number, the product, payment, and shipping information, and your return and refund policy. One must use a real “from” email address instead of noreply@company.com that can be answered by the customer support staff. Also, this will be the right time when you can offer your guest customers the option to create an account.
Setting up your own e-commerce business is really exhilarating but hold on as we’ve got the best payment solutions for you and your customers. PayStudio provides the best Payment Gateway platform for your e-commerce website. Providing the most secure and reliable payment solutions. So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with us for more information or visit our website www.paystudio.vip.
You can also email our support team at support@paystudio.vip or chat/call us at +44 0 (800) 887 0291.
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