Payment gateway outages are not likely to occur, but we cannot rule out the fact that even big payment gateways often have outages. Most online merchants that depend on a single payment gateway are more likely to suffer.
The issues of payment outages are frustrating. Not only do they result in loss of revenue, but they are also annoyingly stressful for you, your team, your customers and users. You might be wondering what the solution should be. The answer is multiple payment gateways.
In this post, we will provide a brief overview of payment gateways and why SaaS companies require more than one payment gateway, why payment failures occur and what to do about it.
What is a payment gateway?
A payment gateway is a service provided for online and traditional businesses to process card and online payments. Its sole purpose is to secure the transaction by encrypting sensitive information while transmitting payments between the payment portal and financial institutions.
When a transaction happens on a payment gateway, it serves as the communication tool between the store or the website, the bank and the payment processor.
The primary reason for a payment gateway is to support data security. It works to encrypt all information, which means hackers cannot access it. Encryption is a super password that blocks hackers from opening up the files to retrieve data.
Why multiple payment gateways?
As a merchant, you do not need to operate in a continuous reactive state. Staying proactive about potential issues and roadblocks is essential to maintaining a competitive edge. There are more reasons why proactively discovering multiple payment gateways is a valuable choice.
Let us explore the top reasons:
Fight potential payment outages
In an instance of an outage, there are two types of transactions that get hampered:
- New sign-ups
- Subscription renewals
You do not know when a potential customer signs up for the first time. When new consumers try signing up during an outage, their chances of coming back gets minimal. Multiple gateways are the solution. It never hurts to redundancy, especially when it comes to onboarding new consumers. Nothing smarter than being proactive when there is an outage.
Provide more payment options
When you offer customers different payment modes like credit cards, EFT, it enhances the customer experience. You can route consumers to other gateways based on the payment option they select.
Accept payment from customers in multiple currencies
Accepting payments from customers in multiple currencies could be a serious issue if your merchant is included in multiple countries. Gateways that ensure a particular country’s local currency makes it smooth to support multiple currencies. Therefore, it eliminates the stress of covering currencies.
Improve the payment success rate
Payments do not process due to insufficient funds. In such cases, merchants want to ensure they offer other payment options to customers. This can improve the odds of the customer finding a source with adequate money to process the transaction.
You may also run A/B tests to determine which gateways perform better for certain types of transactions. Thus, you can route those transactions to the most suitable gateway and minimize the risks of declined payments.
Solve the issue by balancing payment processing loads
Having hundreds of thousands of customers visiting your site and making purchases every day is what no merchant would complain about. Except when it comes to processing large volumes of transactions, leading to disruptions and disgruntled consumers.
It can potentially hurt your reputation and sales in the long run. However, when you choose to use multiple payment gateways, you can mitigate the risks by offloading the payments between multiple providers. Thus, you do not have to worry as much about an outage and delays resulting from a large number of transactions occurring at once.
Without the right technology for payments, merchants will find it harder to decrease churn rates caused by unsuccessful payments. Therefore, you do not want to rely on a single payment gateway because it puts your business at risk of botched systems, hurting your reputation and revenue altogether.
By using a payment gateway package, your eCommerce site will be able to process payments, ensuring customers are able to choose their preferred payment method. PayKun offers multiple payment gateway options to businesses. If you are interested in offering a seamless checkout experience for your customers, be sure to check your options with PayKun and grow your sales.
