Top 6 Online Payment Gateways for Your Shopify store
What are Online Payment Gateways?
Online payment gateways are the eCommerce services that process payment information for websites. Online payment gateways offer two main benefits to eCommerce businesses:
1. They make the checkout process fast and easy.
Have you ever started to make a purchase only to realize that the process of buying the item took too long and required more work than you were willing to do?
The average rate of shopping cart abandonment—people who expressed a clear intent to buy and then didn’t—is around 70%. If your checkout process puts barriers in the way of making a purchase, the likelihood that you’ll lose sales because of it is high.
A good online payment gateway makes the process simple and intuitive so you capture most of those sales rather than losing them.
2. They provide encryption to keep your customer’s information secure.
The threat of identity theft means that every online transaction a customer makes requires trust. You have to make sure that the sensitive information they provide you is protected from hackers around the web that seek to steal credit card information from vulnerable sites.
Since online payment gateways specialize in processing financial information, they have the proper encryption and safety features to keep your customers’ information safe.
The online payment services on the market all aim to offer easy and secure ways to pay. Each has different reasons to consider using them.
10 Online Payment Gateways to consider for your Shopify store
1. Paypal
Paypal is one of the biggest and most familiar of all the online payment options. The site has over 254 million users. That’s a lot of people who would have an easier time making a purchase on your website if you let them check out with Paypal. The service boasts that it’s currently used by over 17 million businesses and that customers who use PayPal to check out convert at 82% higher rates than with other payment options.
That’s a pretty compelling reason to use PayPal.
2. Stripe
Stripe provides an feature-rich payment processing platform that makes it easy to accept payments from a range of sources (credit cards, digital wallets, ACH transfers, and different currencies). They also provide a number of options for the checkout process.
3. 2Checkout
2Checkout is a global payment processing solution that accepts payments from across the world in a number of different currencies. They provide a customizable checkout that you can design and add to your website, extensive fraud protection, and a responsive design that ensures customers can easily check out across devices.
4. Amazon Pay
Paypal may be popular, but Amazon is undisputedly one of the most popular sites across the whole web, and one that almost all your customers will have accounts with already. Adding Amazon Pay to your store can make it easier for Amazon customers to shop with you without having to key in their payment data in your checkout.
You’ll reduce barriers to purchase for hundreds of millions of customers, while also offering a payment option that the company promises has proven fraud protection. Amazon’s payment method works well on mobile devices, offering a seamless experience where it matters most.
5. Apple Pay
For people who use Apple devices—and that’s more than 64% of people in the U.S.—Apple Pay works as a mobile wallet when they’re out and about, and a one-click payment option on websites that accept it. For mobile users, customers can even check out with Apple Pay by using their touch identification—it doesn’t get much easier than that.
Apple Pay uses tokenization to keep credit card information secure, meaning that once a user provides their credit card information to the service, the device communicates with the issuing bank to create a randomly generated number (or token) to represent that card. That obscures the information from hackers, keeping consumers’ financial data safe while working quickly.
6. Google Pay
If anyone can compete with PayPal and Amazon for market share, it’s Google. The company now offers their own online payment method, Google Pay. Google says hundreds of millions their users already have card information saved to their Google accounts, which means providing a Google Pay option offers added convenience for a significant number of people.
As with the other options, they promise an intuitive process—on desktop and mobile—and top-notch security through encryption.
Google Pay also lets retailers set up loyalty programs, digital gift cards, and deals for customers so everyone can skip the paper and plastic cards. And Google Pay works with PayPal and Visa Checkout for added reach.
Notably, they don’t charge you anything for using the service. It’s free for both you and your customers.
