Secure Payment Gateways - Application -

9 Essential Features To Look For In A Good Payment Gateway

by Michelle Newman     Building a merchant website enables to earn while you sleep. At least, that's the basic idea behind an online store. Customers visit your site, browse your displayed products, select the desired items and make purchase orders with their credit cards. These happen while you are comfortably sleeping. But then, it's not as simple as it sounds. You need one important component for your online store to enable customers to make credit card purchases.     You need to install payment gateway software.     The saying “ not all burgers are created equal” holds true with payment gateway. As of this writing, there are several versions of payment gateway program. Some are good, others mediocre, and a number are downright crap. You should have some sort of a guide to distinguish one from the other. You can do this by looking at their respective features and capabilities. The following are essential features you should look for in a good payment gateway: <ol><li>FAST TRANSACTION TIME Customers want a fast processing transaction of their orders. This means that they should not wait for long agonizing minutes to complete their online transaction. Sadly, there are payment gateways that take as long as five minutes waiting time to finish the transaction. As a merchant, you should choose a payment gateway with fast transaction time. </li><li>CONFIGURABLE INTERFACE You should be able to configure your chosen payment gateway so that it would resemble the look and feel of your website. It should not come in a different design or it would scare off potential customers. After all, customers need to feel that they are transacting with you and not some unknown company. </li><li>GLOBAL CURRENCY SUPPORT Supposing you have a US-based merchant website accepting dollar currencies. What about those in Europe or Middle East? They are your potential customers. They have different currencies and these are not in dollars. As a merchant, you should look for a payment gateway which have multi-currency support and built-currency calculator so that you can accept orders from any country in any prevailing currency. </li><li> AVS PROTOCOL AVS stands for Address Verification Service. This is a security feature that matches the billing address of a card holder to the delivery address a customer specifies. This feature screens out most fraudulent card transactions. </li><li>WEB-SUPPORTED TRANSACTION HANDLING This feature will enable you to record and browse transaction-related data in an Internet-support browsers. </li><li>EMAIL CAPABILITIES Your chosen payment gateway program should enable you to send or receive email for every completed transaction. </li><li>MULTI-SHOPPING CART SUPPORT A good payment gateway software should be flexible enough to support a wide variety of shopping carts. In this way, you as the merchant can select the kind of shopping cart that fit your business and your budget. </li><li>RECURRING BILLING CYCLE SUPPORT In some instances, it is necessary for charge a customer's credit card on a recurring cycle without the need for the cardholder to go to the transaction process. This happens on business like magazine subscriptions wherein the customer is automatically billed each month. A good payment gateway should have this handy feature. </li><li>TECHNICAL SUPPORT When problem occurs, you should be able to contact the payment gateway provider. This is necessary for you to have a smooth, worry-free online processing experience. ( Michelle Newman is the CEO of a leading Fortune 500 company based in San Francisco. She lectures on various business topics like marketing, competitive business strategies, and management-related issues. She does some business writings on her spare time.)</li></ol><a href="http://www.onlywire.com/submit?u=http://www.securepaymentgateways.com/9_essential_features_to_look_for_in_a_good_payment_gateway.html;t=payment%20gateway;tags=payment%20gateway" target="_blank" title="Add this Article to Onlywire"><img src="http://www.onlywire.com/i/onlywire.ico" alt="" />Add to Onlywire!</a>

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