What to ask your agency about payment gateways

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on payment gateways, these questions are worth asking early.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Offer the methods your customers already use. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Never store card details you do not need. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. 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.