Using a payment gateway integration that is suited to your software company’s specific needs is an important step towards optimizing your sales performance and customer experience (CX) for users. If you’re planning to offer payment acceptance as part of your solution, integrating your software or mobile app with a payment gateway is a necessary next step in the process.
What Is A Payment Gateway?
A payment gateway is an application that allows you to process a customer’s online credit card payment in a secure way, facilitating the data being transferred between your website and your customers’ payment networks.
This typically involves these steps:
1. Validation of credit or debit card information
2. Verification that the requisite funds are available
3. Approval (or denial) of the payment request sent to the customer’s bank
4. Settlement of the transaction, where the purchase amount is deducted from your customer’s bank account and added to your company’s.
A payment gateway is essentially the intermediary service that makes secure online payments possible. It is the online equivalent of a point-of-sale (POS) terminal in a brick-and-mortar store, which is used to accept or decline customer payments on a provider’s premises.
When Should You Consider Switching Your Payments Integration Provider?
Perhaps you have experienced issues with your current payment gateway integration that you aren’t happy about. Maybe the security updates are not as timely or frequent as you would like, or the costs may seem excessive for the value you are receiving.
It could be that the technical resources may be lacking in areas that are important to you, or maybe you feel that the payment process is not as efficient as a modern checkout process should be. It’s a good idea to have a periodic appraisal of any services that are central to your business and to benchmark against the market’s leading solutions to ensure that you’re receiving the right service for your business.
Your current payments system might be working well, and perhaps you haven’t even considered the option of switching. However, by considering your options, you can learn about superior processes from other providers in the market, who could have new, value-generating features. The payment gateway field is constantly updating and innovating, so there is always space to compare providers to find a product that helps your business grow.
5 Benefits to Look For In A Payment Gateway Integration
The ideal payment gateway provider delivers a number of important advantages.
1. Payment Processes
Making the payment process as seamless as possible for users can enhance the overall customer experience. Some industries experience up to 83.6% average abandonment of online shopping cartsdue to poor checkout processes. Optimization of this final step in the sales process removes points of friction for customers and potential churn, resulting in improved sales completion rates.
2. Security
Customers want to know that they can confidently shop with your company, with the confidence that your payments system is fully secure. Highlighting that your business offers optimal protection from data breaches and fraud is an essential prerequisite to ensuring that, not only do your customers have the best shopping experience from start to finish but that you maintain and increase retention rates.
3. Sales Growth Features
A payment gateway can help improve your sales growth and customer acquisition strategies. By integrating with a gateway partner that offers marketing support to help incentivize your software users to process payments, you can continue to grow your portfolio. Marketing support like this can include conversion campaigns, new customer acquisition strategies and loyalty programs to help increase your sales performance and reduce customer attrition. Not only that, some gateway integration providers offer profit-sharing and incentive programs. Through these, you can enjoy residual earnings for the payments your software users process.
4. Easy Accounting and PCI Compliance
Smoothing out processes and removing friction shouldn’t just apply to customers. The ideal payment gateway integration should also enable efficient accounting processes for your back office. This may include simple portfolio management, smart customer reconciliation and reporting tools, and transaction management. Moreover, the right solution should offer comprehensive tools that reduces associated costs and time to comply with the PCI Compliance Standards.
5. Straightforward Integration
Quick and easy integration allows you to launch secure payment devices into any software environment. Using a provider that offers universal browser compatibility, instant software updates, and a developer-friendly API environment, as well as custom branding and security features such as tokenization and point-to-point encryption, will help improve your business’s overall performance. It’s also important to integrate with a provider that supports your business with high-quality service during every step of your integration and beyond.
Choosing the Right Payment Gateway to Maximize Software Performance
The importance of benchmarking your current payment gateway provider and, if applicable, switching to another that provides more value and better fits your business needs is clear. Using the right payment gateway integration can help your software company to grow into a number of new business areas, enjoying greater customer conversion and sales results, improved security, optimized PCI compliance, and value-added data-driven features that can generate crucial customer insights.
In a modern commerce landscape in which customers are becoming increasingly more demanding of impeccable, seamless customer experiences - with studies predicting that the customer experience will become even more important than the product itself by 2020 - software companies can’t afford to have a payment process that causes poor experiences, or provide services that are inferior to their competitors.
If you’re interested in learning more about integrating your software or mobile app with a gateway, visit our Integrate Payments page and discover the benefits of an integrated partnership.