Is Your Payment Gateway working for your E-Commerce?

Is Your Payment Gateway working for your E-Commerce
Do you have the best payment gateway possible for your e-commerce business? It’s important to know that every aspect of your business is running at peak efficiency. How do you tell if your payment solution is right for your online store?
First, you should think about your priorities and what you consider to be the best aspect of a payment system. BlueSnap has created an awesome quiz to find out if your payment gateway is working for you or against you. Put your gateway to the test!
Is Your Payment Gateway working for your E-Commerce? - Does your payment gateway make the cut?
Choosing the best payment system for your online store isn’t always easy. There are some things you might not necessarily consider when choosing a gateway, so here are the 6 top criteria to look for:

6 Ways to Know if your Payment Gateway is Right for Your Online Store

The following criteria will give you a place to start when considering your payment gateway. Look at each quality below and evaluate whether your current payment system matches up with what you need.

1. Scalability

The first question you should ask regarding your payment solution is whether it is scalable or not. Can your payment system grow with your customer demand as your customer base grows, or is it limited (either too small to grow or too big to be efficient for smaller stores)? If not, you may want to seriously evaluate your system to see how it can be improved.

2. Conversion tracker

It’s important to be aware of how your payment gateway is affecting your conversions. Conversions are the main goal of your e-commerce website. So make sure that you have a way to both track and improve the level of conversions by making changes in your payment system if needed.
You should try to go for a payment gateway that will track conversions and give you supplementary data so you can optimize.

3. Customized look

Remember that you must keep your whole website and brand consistent. The look of your payment system should not deter from or be too different from your branding on your website. Think about whether your payment platform is allowing you to customize the look so that it does not deviate too far from your website design and look.
Some payment gateways will direct a customer to their site in order to complete the transaction. While this can have some benefits (especially if you’re leveraging a known and trusted gateway), you need to think about whether you want something that will flow with your checkout process and stay native to your site.

4. Mobile-friendly (UX)

Is your website mobile-friendly?
What about your payment system? It’s important that this last step of your sales funnel (purchasing) is responsive and mobile-friendly to your mobile customers. Remember that the number of mobile customers is now reaching higher numbers than traditional desktop users. So you don’t want to make things difficult for your mobile users, and having a payment gateway that creates obstacles on mobile is a sure way to a higher cart abandonment rate.

5. Functionality

Remember that the most important aspect of your payment system is that it is working and functional to all customers. You could lose important sales to your competition if your payments do not go through correctly. Your payment gateway is the holy grail of customer trust. If something fails halfway through or if the order isn’t completed, it’s likely that you’ve lost a customer and they probably won’t be back.
You should always test everything in your store. We like to say that you should get the least tech-savvy person you know to take a tour through your site and complete a purchase. This will give you a great indication as to how user-friendly your checkout process is.

6. Tech support effectiveness/availability

Another question you should ask yourself about your e-commerce business is how well your payment gateway’s support answers questions and problems when you need help.
If you’re struggling to get support over the phone and you can’t reach a human being through any channel, it might be time to consider trading up.

Is my Payment Gateway Sabotaging me?

Your payment gateway is the central point to your sales funnel. All of your efforts to convert lead to this single part of your online store- so having something that is sub-par or isn’t working towards that same goal will be detrimental to your conversion rate. Here’s how to know if your payment gateway isn’t pulling its weight: 

1. You can’t reach a human to save your life

Despite the plethora of AI systems that are automated for e-commerce businesses, it’s important to keep the human element alive. Being able to connect with more than just documentation, a community forum, and a chatbot to get your problem fixed is definitely something you need to look out for. If you can’t connect with a human being in a reasonable amount of time, it might be time to switch payment gateways.

2. A sudden jump of failed conversions

Suddenly customers who purchase from you frequently are starting to abandon their carts more often, and your conversion rate starts to plummet,  the first thing you should look at is your payment gateway.  Is it fluid? Is it functioning correctly? Most importantly: is it a hassle?
You should also check to see if your payment gateway is providing cross-border payments.  If it’s not capable of processing payments from your international customers, you should think about getting a payment gateway that does.

3. What’s the Downtime percentage like?

You need to decrease the amount of downtime that you are getting on your current platform, especially with your payment system. No matter how well your customers and shoppers like your website and products, if your platform failed in the payment step, they may desert your site and go to your competitors, instead. Don’t let this happen. Look into other payment options if you are struggling with the checkout process or if you notice a large number of dropouts from your online visitors in the payment step.
Remember that even 99% up-time for any given server or service is still over an hour and a half of downtime per week.

4. Is your Checkout Process Fluid?

It’s important to study your metrics and find out at what point your customers are dropping out of the process and abandoning your site. If your payment platform does not function properly, they will never make it to the final phase. The absolute last place that you want to find obstacles is in your checkout process, and your payment gateway needs to never be an obstacle between the customer and conversion.

5. Does it handle returns easily?

What if your customer, inevitably, needs to cancel or return their orders? You have to make absolutely sure that your payment gateway can handle returns and reimbursements easily and without issue. This can also be a hidden cost for you, especially if your payment gateway has the habit of siding with the customer and charging you a premium on returns. You absolutely have to check that before signing on with a payment gateway.

How to test your Payment Gateway:

Evaluate your payment system and take the quiz on the BlueSnap site and see where your site stacks up. It could be that you don’t have all of the problems that we’ve discussed above. But even one issue can slow down your cash flow and inhibit your business growth.
What were your quiz results? Tell us below or tweet us!