Five mistakes teams make with payment gateways

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit payment gateways.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Offer the methods your customers already use
• Fees differ more than the marketing pages suggest
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Never store card details you do not need. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Turning this into a decision

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
• Fees differ more than the marketing pages suggest — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.