Payment gateways: what to get right first

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you only fix one thing about payment gateways this quarter, make it the first item below.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Start here

Offer the methods your customers already use. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Then this

Fees differ more than the marketing pages suggest. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Eventually

Never store card details you do not need. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

How to tell if yours is fine

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.