© Copyright khedmeh Wall
Having strong online payment systems in place is helpful not only to you but also to your clients. In most cases, late payments happen due to misunderstandings with your invoices or trouble with the payment system. When you make the payment process hassle-free, clients pay invoices on time, and as a result, your cash flow cycle gets healthier.
With more than a dozen payment solutions on the market, choosing one can be difficult, especially when you aren’t familiar with the technical side of things.
To help you, we have put together this guide on how you can choose the best online payment system for your business. We’ve also compared a few of the most popular ones on their basic features, ease-of-access, and the value they provide. Intrigued? Read on!
The most important thing to consider while selecting an online payment gateway is how well it suits your specific business needs. Here are a few questions you can ask when you start looking for one.
What Do You Expect From The Payment Platform?You can start by listing all your requirements and then see which ones can be realistically fulfilled by an online payment solution. Most of them provide the following to users:
Ease-of-access and user-friendliness
When you’re trying to make things easier for your clients, you can’t afford to have a steep learning curve. Everything needs to be plain and simple — easily understandable by people who aren’t tech-savvy.
External integrations
Having your payment gateway automatically communicate with your CRM and other business software is essential. This reduces manual involvement and hence reduces the margin for error.
Support for multiple payment types
Scaling your business globally requires you to be able to process multiple card types and multiple currencies. And if your payment solution can’t handle that, you may not be able to scale quickly.
Reporting and analytics
Having analytics in place helps you understand the trends and patterns in your cash flow so you can better track any anomalies in the cycle. This also makes reporting payment updates to senior management or any external authorities easier.
Good customer support
No matter how good your payment solution is, you may still run into problems with it. That is why you will need efficient customer support to get you back on your feet with minimal downtime.
An ideal payment system should be able to process all kinds of transactions. You need to ensure the one you are getting doesn’t miss an essential type that you may need.
Some common online transactions that your payment solution must be able to handle include:
Debit/credit cards
Internet banking
Mobile wallets
Digital payments apps
Unified Payments Interface (UPI)
Most payment systems charge you per transaction, and some even have an upper limit for the maximum amount you can transact per day or month. Each transaction has a certain fixed cost along with a percentage cost of the total amount transacted.
When picking one for your business, you must reach a good compromise between the fixed price and percentage charge so that you can transact large and small sums at decent rates.
Paypal, one of the most popular payment solutions worldwide, charges somewhere between 1.9% and 3.5% per transaction and a fixed fee of under 50 cents. The exact amount depends on the PayPal product you’re using, but for most of them, a $100 transaction will cost you between $2 and $3.99.
The Wall