When payment gateways is worth the effort

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Payment gateways is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

When it is worth it

Offer the methods your customers already use. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How to decide

Never store card details you do not need. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

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
• 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.