Payment gateways: a practical guide

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. This guide covers what payment gateways actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What is actually at stake

Offer the methods your customers already use. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

The practical version

Fees differ more than the marketing pages suggest. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Never store card details you do not need. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Offer the methods your customers already use
• Fees differ more than the marketing pages suggest
• Never store card details you do not need
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

The mistakes we see most

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Where to go from here

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.