A practical checklist for payment gateways

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Run through this the next time payment gateways comes up.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The checklist

• 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
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Offer the methods your customers already use. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about payment gateways before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Offer the methods your customers already use — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.