Getting started with payment gateways
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A short on-ramp to payment gateways for teams who have not touched it before.
In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
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. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Fees differ more than the marketing pages suggest
- Change one thing and measure it
Never store card details you do not need. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What this looks like day to day
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
- 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
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.