Three myths about payment gateways

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few things about payment gateways that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“It only matters for big sites”

Offer the methods your customers already use. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

“Our platform handles it”

Never store card details you do not need. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.