The joy of payment (gateway providers)
If you’re making money online, you could be raising revenue through Amazon Marketplace, eBay or affiliate traffic. It’s a doddle, you’ve got no exposure to credit-card fraud, no chargebacks, no settlement periods to worry about, you just collect a cheque or watch an electronic transfer go kerching in your online account.
But sooner or later you will make the jump into a full ecommerce store (get the book!), and when you do you’ll need to get a payment gateway provider (PGP). Well actually, you’ll need a few pieces in the jigsaw.
Last month, we launched Healthspark. Healthspark is an OScommerce site we built for £200, and it broke even on day 2. When we launched the site, I tried to bypass the PGP route, and went instead for just PayPal and Google Checkout (see earlier post on Google Adwords Checkout).
Both PayPal and Google Checkout are not PGPs - they’re complete payment solution providers. You don’t need an SSL certificate (the thing that gives you a padlock on your site). You don’t process credit cards, you don’t keep the data (in fact with Google Checkout you might not even get the email address of your customer).
The Paypal/Google checkout thing has worked well for HealthSpark in its infancy, until Google Checkout decided that the natural remedies for male problems might infringe its stringent policies. I don’t mind Google having anti-gun, anti-natural remedy policies, anti-everything but their response was strange. When Google complained, we pulled checkout. When we removed the offending items, Google wouldn’t re-instate Google Checkout until we’d put the buttons back (even though they didn’t work) on a LIVE SITE! Long story short, Google Checkout is back, but now we push on with a PGP.
If you want real control (and better credit card commission rates) you’ll need to process credit cards using a payment gateway provider (PGP). Your bank (Merchant provider) will give you a Merchant account. You then need to look at a PGP.
Your website can interface with the PGP in two ways. First (and best) it can transmit credit card details from a secure page (SSL - padlocked), the customer never leaves the site, and the PGP handles everything in the background. Second, you can pass your customer from our site to a branded page (hosted on the PGP’s servers), the payment is handled, and the customer returned to a thank you page on your site. This latter route is a good alternative, there are no SSL costs, no security risks, and the brand of your PGP can help secure the deal (e.g. NatWest).
Your bank will be keen to push their own PGP - most high street banks are now running their own PGPs, but look at the small print carefully, you need to consider commission rates and payment terms.
The joy of payment is a joy often deferred, whichever route you choose.
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