Selecting Your Ideal eCommerce Payment Gateway

Ecommerce companies need the ability to meet the changing payment expectations of customers. To do so, you must have reliable payment gateway integrations. 

But how do you choose the right ones for your eCommerce business or marketplace? 

You should take several different factors and features into consideration when choosing a gateway provider. Moreover, it is imperative to consider what platform you choose to support your entire payment operations, including a multi-provider approach to payment gateways if needed.  

What to Consider When Optimizing Your eCommerce Payment Processing 

Choosing the right gateways plays a vital role in perfecting your payments as an eCommerce business. 

Before you can make these decisions, however, you need to consider the many complexities that go into eCommerce payment processing. Below, we have provided an overview of the key factors to consider when assessing your payment needs and selecting primary and secondary gateways: 

Payment Methods

Customers’ preferred payment methods are ever-changing and increasingly diverse.

From 2024 to 2029, analysts predict global eCommerce transactions will grow by approximately 63%, reaching a value of $11.4 trillion. Juniper Research names the use of alternative payment methods (APMs) as a key driver of this growth, helping the eCommerce industry to reach emerging markets. 

Some of the top APMs competing with traditional card payments in the eCommerce space include digital wallets, account-to-account payments, and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services. Local payments are also contributing to this new mosaic of payment solutions, with customers in harder-to-reach regions preferring payment options that connect with their local banks and providers. 

Cross-Border Transactions

The eCommerce industry has gone global, requiring your business to tailor its approach to payments to different markets to keep up and remain competitive. Statista data shows that cross-border transactions in the B2C space equate to roughly $785 billion in total market value.  

Flexible gateway connections are a vital component to enabling efficient cross-border transactions. Your business needs the financial and operational agility to meet highly varied payment needs of customers making purchases in different regions of the world. 

Cost and Time Efficiency

A below-average payment experience can result in serious consequences for your business. 

When choosing a payment gateway, you need a solution that makes the checkout process quick and painless for the customer. 

The 2024 Commerce and Payment Trends Report highlights that, since the pandemic, millions of consumers have grown accustomed to embedded payment experiences that do not require them to leave the channel or applications from where they are shopping during checkout. This emphasizes a growing need for improved integrations of gateways that keep your customers transacting as simply as possible. 

Disruptions to your primary gateway provider or clunky payment experiences that redirect customers away from your main eCommerce shop can result in cart abandonment and reduced long-term retention.

Rerouting Capabilities

Sometimes, payments fail—and sometimes, it’s due to a gateway outage. 

Gateway failures don’t happen often, but when they do, you need the ability to reroute transactions to a secondary gateway. Automatic rerouting capabilities prevent delays in the payment experience which can keep your customers satisfied even in the face of an outage or failure of your primary provider. 

Dealing with these issues has less to do with the gateways themselves and more to do with your chosen payment platform. You need a platform that allows you to integrate multiple gateways and assign secondary options where payments can be rerouted and retried when necessary. 

‍

Is There a “Best” Payment Gateway for eCommerce?

Nowadays, there are plenty of payment gateway providers for eCommerce businesses to choose from.

To give just a sampling, some of Spreedly’s preferred payment partners for eCommerce include:

• WorldPay: Worldpay, a global acquirer and payment gateway provider, offers support for 146 countries and 135 currencies. More than one million merchants trust Worldpay with their payment needs. In addition to payment gateway services, Worldpay also provides solutions for embedded payments, payment management, and payment security.
• CyberSource: With payment acceptance across more than 160 countries, CyberSource offers extensive global reach for growing eCommerce businesses. CyberSource provides a flexible payment gateway solution that can support online, in-person, and mobile payments. 
• PayPal: Available in 200 countries and regions, PayPal is one of the fastest growing gateway providers today. Through PayPal, you can access 25 global currencies, while customers can securely connect a whole world of different payment methods according to their specific wants and needs.

However, when it comes to the “best” gateway for your business, there’s likely not one gateway that comes out completely on top of the others. The eCommerce industry has seen intense growth over the last decade, and businesses are dealing with higher payment volumes and more complex payment needs with every passing day. What your business truly needs is a multi-provider approach.

Using multiple payment gateways gives you the ability to increase your geographic coverage by connecting many different payment processors and increasing your business flexibility. 

Why a Payment Gateway Tailored to eCommerce Matters

Every click counts in the eCommerce industry, making the payment experience a big deal.

Should your customers encounter problems at checkout, that split-second frustration can end up being a major deal-breaker that drives them away from your business. 

The payment gateways we’ve detailed above can give you a highly tailored solution that meets the specific and unique needs of your eCommerce operations—and with Spreedly’s open payments platform, you can tailor that experience even further. 

Spreedly gives you the freedom to connect to different payment gateway providers all from one central platform. With our solutions, you can streamline your eCommerce gateway integrations with ease. Plus, our rerouting and retry capabilities help you maximize revenue and minimize the occurrence of failures.

Check out the Spreedly demo today to get started.

Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below