If you’re running any form of ecommerce platform, there’s a high chance that you want to take payments online. There are so many payment systems available, where do you start? Read on as we run through our top 7 (in no order of preference). Then once you have yours up and running, the challenge is making that first eCommerce sale!
PayPal is one of the world’s most used online payment and money transfer service with over 170 million users and over 25 active currencies. This means that it is a really useful service if you are dealing with people buying products in multiple currencies, although there are charges involved with transactions in different currencies. You can also connect the account to a debit/credit card, both for making payments and transferring money back to your bank account. PayPal is a favoured service because customers can make payments without leaving your site.
Square is an all-round payment processing and finance management system and sells itself on the ability to help you manage your inventory and pricing really easily. As well as managing payments to your site and complicated inventories, Square also enables you to track sales in real time, analyse sales and the statistics associated with them, send customers customised receipts, manages refunds, adjusts for discounts and tips, and can also print kitchen tickets for orders if you’re a food and drink supplier. Wow, it does a lot, but make sure you’re not overpaying for something you don’t need full service from.
Google Wallet is essentially Google’s own version of PayPal, except that they also have their own card attached to the account (debit mastercard – US only). Google claim that their payment system for business websites enhances the user experience as people can pay and checkout in 2 clicks, I guess you’ll have to test that for yourself!
Amazon Payments is an easy payment online payment system for people who have Amazon accounts as they can log in with their Amazon log in and their details will already be saved (billing and address). You need to register either a personal or a business account, but you must have a business account if you want to link it to a business credit or debit card. You can withdraw money to your bank account in a similar way to PayPal.
Dwolla is a new PayPal-competitor for integration with US bank accounts and finance providers. However, Dwolla has a monthly payment structure for using their service, and this varies depending on the number of transactions that take place each month and some other services.
Stripe is the developers’ favourite, with a set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enable businesses to accept and manage payments online, enabling you to build your own payment forms. A relatively new improvement is their Relay service, which allows customers buy your products whilst in other apps, for example in tweets on Twitter.
Now this is a relatively new payment system and is essentially a virtual currency. I’m not going to profess to fully understanding the ins and outs of Bitcoin, but there are plenty of resources out there to help you. Bitcoin has created systems so that you can easily integrate it into multiple open-source platforms for eCommerce.
We specialise in creating bespoke systems that meet your website’s individual requirements, and can integrate payment processing seamlessly into the site. Get in touch if you want to find out more about how we can work together: hello@webfwd.co.uk
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