Choosing the right payment method for your WooCommerce store is an important aspect of your business. In order to choose the right one, you need to go through various options, before you arrive at the right one that suits your business needs. You might stumble upon various payment options in WooCommerce, but the real knack lies in detecting the right payment gateway for your store. You need to consider a lot of factors before you decide upon which is best. For a start, you can make use of the core WooCommerce payment gateway options that are quite handy. But as your store flourishes, you need to choose other payment gateways for WooCommerce that ensure seamless integration for secured transactions. Here are some factors that will help you choose the right payment gateway for WooCommerce.
Choosing the right payment gateway for WooCommerce
With the right payment gateway, you can easily accept the payments from your customers without any obstacle. You need not have a complicated process, but the right one to be used in your WooCommerce store. So to choose the payment gateway lets narrow down the options on the basis of which we need to choose.
When selecting and setting up the WooCommerce payment gateways, we need to be sure about a few things :
- Cost – You need to verify if there are costs, other than the first payments. If you are paying higher transaction charges for the payment plugin, then you need to reconsider the option.
- Security – The major concern when considering payment is security. The shop owner must be quite vigilant in handling the sensitive information of the store and customers.
- Currency support – When you are selling in multiple countries, it is important to ensure that multiple currencies are supported.
- Locations- Most of the store owners run their business in various locations, hence supporting the currency and the respective location is also important.
- Support Subscriptions – When you deal with subscriptions, which requires periodic renewal, then you need to provide the way it works in your WooCommerce store.
The other important things to keep in mind while choosing the right payment gateway for WooCommerce is :
PCI Compliance – Payments must be always secured. If you are offering online payments, it is important to ensure that your store has an SSL certificate for PCI Compliance. If you do not have one, then you can redirect the customer to the payment page and then redirect them to the store back. Most of the store owners do the same to avoid the hassle of obtaining PCI compliance.
Currency Support – Mostly WooCommerce provides only one base currency support at a time. If you want to incorporate the same, either you can opt for premium payment gateway plugins that can help you associate multiple currencies for your store or you need to create your own set up to support multiple currencies.
Which Payment Gateway to go for?
When you are searching for payment gateway plugins, you can either opt for the classic WooCommerce core payment plugins, which are simple and easy to use in your store. The basic classic payment methods offered by WooCommerce are -Direct Bank Transfer(BACS), Check payments, and Cash on Delivery. These payment methods are easier to set up and are readily available.
If you are looking for other premium options for payment plugins, then you have options like Stripe, Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Pay Pal, etc. You can take a look at how to add the following payment plugins in your WooCommerce store:
- Add Stripe Payment plugin to your WooCommerce store.
- Adding Amazon Pay payment plugin on your WooCommerce store.
- Add Authorize.net payment plugin on your WooCommerce store.
Hosted Vs Integrated Payment options
Payment gateways also have options for hosted and integrated payment options. In the case of hosted ones, your customer will be redirected to the payment site and once the payment is done, the customer is redirected to the shop page. In this case, the store owners need not worry about PCI compliance as well as data security. The downside of this hosted option is that, while redirecting to the payment page, these offsite payment pages are not trusted all the time and at times even the customers do not prefer the same.
In the case of integrated payment gateways, the customers need not leave the store for making the payment. It offers a smooth and seamless experience for making payments. In order to make use of the integrated payment options, you need to ensure you have PCI-DSS compliance. PCI-DSS compliance ensures consistent data security to avoid any fraudulence. Read more about PCI-DSS Compliance in the WooCommerce docs.
If the payment gateway accepts international payments?
When your business is present internationally, you need to ensure that the payment gateway lets you accept payments internationally. Also, you need to check whether it supports multiple countries for payments. In order to facilitate international payment options, it is important to list international currencies while displaying prices. You can make use of Currency Converter Widget to convert the currencies in real-time.
Accepting payments in local currency
Let your customer be able to pay in their local currency. It is the most convenient and acceptable option every customer would prefer. If you are displaying the price in the local currency and expect the customer to pay transaction charges with currency conversion fees, then you might see a lot of cart abandonment. The customer expects to pay in their local currency which was displayed on the shop page. It is ideal to let the customer pay in the local currency by facilitating the same using the payment plugins.
Charges for each domestic and international transaction
Most credit card transactions charge a minimum of 3 percent on every transaction. You need to be sure that your customers are not charged more when they are paying as well as you don’t incur such charges. You need to be sure that there are no hidden charges in domestic and international transactions done on your store.
Easy to process a refund or is there any additional fee being charging on refunds happening
Refunds are quite common when you are running an eCommerce store. Handling these refunds is a laborious task. Certain payment plugins charge an invariably small amount on processing refunds. Payment plugins like Stripe do not charge any hidden charges while processing refunds. You can choose such payment gateway plugins that do not charge you any extra amount on refund processing.
Good and responsive customer support
When dealing with payment options, you need to be extra cautious. When you have the best support team to assist you at any time, you will be pretty confident in using such payment gateways. If the support is dormant, we get anxious struck and will panic when it comes to money transactions. Having proactive support is an ideal option.
Trust factor
The duration of a firm in the industry and the popularity they attain plays a vital role in choosing the plugin. Most of the businesses choose the payment plugins by surveying the factors like how popular they are with other businesses and how they perform.
Easy Integration with WooCommerce or even other platforms
If you are planning to use a payment plugin that can be integrated with the eCommerce platform, you need to look for how easy it is to integrate the same. In the case of WooCommerce, you can find many payment plugins that are available with WooCommerce, that can be integrated with just a few steps. WooCommerce also offers certain core payment plugins that are easy to use and are already integrated. Moreover, other popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal,Authorize.net, etc are available, which offer hassle-free integration.
Conclusion
To improve your customer experience and augment the sales, you need to choose the right payment plugin that is secured. You need to be extra cautious in choosing the payment method which greatly depends on the choice of the customer. Every customer prefers a seamless checkout, and as a store owner, it is important to choose the apt one for your WooCommerce store.
