Choosing the Best Payment Gateway

Just like every other product on the market, there are a number of payment gateway solution providers in the Indian market. To enable their customers to have a smooth shopping experience, merchants try everything in their capacity to hire or install the best payment gateway in the market. Big or small, all e-commerce owners need to be cautious while choosing a gateway system that works best for them.

Here are some of the important criteria that need to be considered by merchants before deciding the apt one for their business.

  1. Cost of setting up the payment gateway. The annual fee and the TDR too need to be considered. One will find a mix of all types here. Some offer free setup plans, and some offer paid setups. While few offer choice of free plans that have limited features and paid ones that have unlimited features. Same with the maintenance fees – some are flexible in making it free and some charge for this. For the transaction fee, it would generally be charged as a % commission on the sale.
  2. The time that would be required to set up the gateway – hardware and software. Some of the companies ask for documents and take almost a week to set things in place while some offer instant setup.
  3. The user interface system of the payment gateway – a good gateway would be one that has a friendly user interface that is intuitive, simple and easy to understand and operate.
  4. What are the payment options that the gateway works with? While most would accept credit cards, debit cards, online banking, virtual wallets and UPI, however, one must compare the number of banks and credit card companies that the gateway is associated with.
  5. And after sale support – another grey area that needs to check beforehand.

Before selecting any one payment gateway, it is advisable to do the following:-

  1. Speak to the sales or support team to understand each and every minute detail. For example, a particular solution provider may enlist a number of currencies that it supports but in reality they may not be really supporting all the currencies as yet. The important thing is to read through the brochure or the content on their website and then speak or meet up with a customer support executive.
  2. Also, read through some relevant articles written by either people who are hardware experts and software specialists or are from the banking background or are customers who have jotted down their experience with different solution providers. These articles will be closest to the true picture giving the merchant a deep insight into the state of affairs of payment management systems.
  3. Use the internet to search for the top five or top ten payment gateways in the region or country. These are also information storehouses because the writer would either have compiled the information from lots of other related pages or would be offering suggestions based on his experience of using a couple of the payment gateways.