Payment gateways: the questions we get asked most

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. The questions about payment gateways that come up most often on our calls.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Do we need to care about this?

Offer the methods your customers already use. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How do we know it is working?

Never store card details you do not need. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What this looks like day to day

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
• Never store card details you do not need — 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.