Trying to find the best payment gateway providers can be overwhelming, especially with all of the available options out there. If you’re not experienced with all the aspects of taking online payments on your site, then you may need guidance that can only come from an experienced payment processing provider like BlueCart that can provide an integrated solution that doesn’t require setup or management, to keep things running even during seasonality in business.
However, if you’re leaning toward running everything yourself (e.g. if you’re using headless eCommerce), then there are ways to do it. Just keep in mind that if any part of your secure payment portal fails, then you could be placing yourself and your customers at risk for security breaches.
Learn about the best payment gateway options for your business.
What Is the Best Online Payment Gateway?
If you’re searching for a payment gateway for your online eCommerce shop, you can easily be overwhelmed by all the options. For an easy-to-use, but scalable option, check out BlueCart Payments. Our payment processing services have the lowest rates in the industry and are integrated into all BlueCart eCommerce services, making it a one-stop-shop for many businesses, whether small, medium, or large.
There are so many options when trying to find a payment gateway. It depends on the size of your business, the number of transactions you conduct in a year, and what platform you use for your eCommerce business. Some payment gateway options that could work for various types of businesses include:
- PayPal
- Braintree
- Stripe
- BigCommerce
- Authorize.net
Best Gateway Payment Services
Signing up for a payment gateway should get you some standard services that come with it. For example, signing up for Bluecart gives you important features like secure transactions, no monthly fees, scalability, and more.
When you look for a payment gateway, make sure it has important services such as:
- Scalability: You want to pick a gateway that can grow with your business. If it can’t adapt, then you will have to spend time and money moving to a different one.
- Ability to integrate: Your payment gateway needs to be able to integrate with the other software you use--like hospitality software--if you don’t pick an all-in-one payment processor.
- Ensuring PCI compliance: The gateway is a key player in ensuring that your business is compliant with PCI rules and regulations, and whichever one you choose should have the ability to keep that compliance up-to-date.
- Providing end-to-end encryption: The best way to keep customer card data secure is through end-to-end encryption. This means the payment gateway keeps the data from ever touching your systems and only releases it to the financial institution, ensuring it’s protected from hackers.
- Offering custom options: While some companies will charge per transaction, others will create a custom package for you depending on how big your company is and how many transactions you process each year.
- Creating invoices: If your payment gateway provider can also create invoice templates and send them out to your customers, then that makes it a lot easier on you as a business owner. If you use an eCommerce marketplace like BlueCart, you can create and send invoices all in a single invoice management platform. Not to mention process those payments and even send out automated emails when bills are due.
- Processing recurring payments: If you have subscription billing that goes out each month, then it’s important to have a payment processor that can do this for you. Automating this process can save you a lot of time. BlueCart users can easily set up and manage recurring billing and even set up an additional subscription box business model in the platform.
- Sending/receiving ACH payments: Not only should you accept payments online via debit and credit card payments, but also ACH payments. Make sure that your payment processing provider can receive ACH payments.
Best White Label Payment Gateway
A truly customized payment gateway experience means that your company’s entire payment process is branded with your logo. It makes it look as though the customer never leaves your site during the payment process. When your logo is on the payment page, then it can help to reduce abandoned shopping carts and increase your customer’s trust in your company. They may feel less than confident buying from you if they are redirected to a third-party site without your company branding. Some companies that offer white label payment gateway services include:
- NMI
- Mastercard
- Stripe
- MONEI
Best Payment Gateway for WooCommerce
If you’re using WooCommerce for your online eCommerce business, then there are several options you can choose from for payment gateways. WooCommerce offers its own payment processor, called WooCommerce Payments. You can get started for free and then you pay per transaction as you go. Each transaction is 2.9 percent plus $0.30. Using this option will give customers a seamless payment option. There are other options you can choose for WooCommerce, which are:
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Square
- Amazon Pay
- Braintree
Best Payment Gateway for Shopify
Likely, if you have a Shopify store, then you are using Shopify Pay, which is their payment processor and gateway. This is the easiest payment solution for Shopify since it integrates with all of their features already. Shopify offers three different tiers depending on the size of your business. There’s Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. For smaller businesses, Basic Shopify is likely the best bet. It’s $29 a month and charges 2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction.
Best Payment Gateway for Prestashop
Prestashop is an open-source eCommerce platform. If you’re using Prestashop you probably had a developer create your site for you and are paying for web hosting somewhere else.. There are many different payment gateway modules available through Prestashop. Some are free to download, while others have an initial download fee.
Prestashop Checkout is free to download, but it is not available for use in all countries. It has a 4.1 out of 5 star rating on the Prestashop Official Addons Marketplace, so if you plan on only doing business throughout the US and Europe, that may be a good option for you. If you want to download Stripe, that’s a $74.99 fee plus the transaction fees that Stripe will charge. Luckily, you get payments powered by Stripe without the $74.99 fee when you use BlueCart for eCommerce and Payment Processing.
Best Payment Gateway API
Some payment processors don’t allow for much customization, so if you have an on-site developer and want to customize your payment process to make it a more seamless transition for customers, there are some payment gateway providers that offer an application programming interface (API). These include options like:
- Stripe
- Square
- Stax
- Braintree
Best Payment Gateway for Small Business
For a smaller business that doesn’t run as many transactions and thus doesn’t need a custom package, there are options out there that may allow you to streamline your payment process as much as possible. For example, some companies will provide you with equipment so that you can take payment at a physical location, but won’t give you the tools needed to conduct successful online transactions. If you’re only operating online or both online and in-person, then BlueCart might be a good option for you. Some gateways to check out include:
- BlueCart
- Stripe
- Amazon Pay
- Braintree
Frequent Asked Questions About Best Payment Gateway Services
What Is a Payment Gateway Service?
A payment gateway service is a tool that reads and also transfers a customer's payment information to the merchant's bank account. Its purpose is to collect the data and ensure that the funds are available so that the merchant can get paid.
What Is API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface and it is software that allows two different applications to communicate with each other.
What Is the best payment gateway for Shopify?
If you're using Shopify, the best payment gateway for Shopify is Shopify Pay. It's also considered to be the easiest payment gateway for the platform since it already has all of the integrated features for it.
Getaway With a Gateway
As a business owner, no matter how large or small your business may be, you’re busy. Ensuring that each transaction runs smoothly takes up a lot of your most valuable resource, which is your time. Instead of trying to coordinate all of this on your own, consider working with a payment processing provider like BlueCart that will offer you all of these services in one convenient spot. Whether you operate with net 30 invoices, only accept eCheck payment, or more, we can help!