How to set up the payment system at your site?
By: Artem S
Tags: Payments, Ecommerce, Gateway, Solutions, Finance

In the previous article, we’ve spoken about choosing the best type of the payment gateway for your online store. We’ve identified that the best approach is to base your decisions on the development stage your store is at, as opposed to specific offerings or marketing messages you come across. Thus, if you’re just starting your ecom journey, it’s easier to set up a redirect payment gateway. This will cut out any time or time investments you might need to build out the internal coding solutions at your site. Our payment gateway exactly.com offers these capabilities, among others.

And in this article, we’d like to discuss the details for setting up the fully integrated payment gateway at your site, i.e. the hosted processor seamlessly embedded right into your coding environment.

It’s always better to base your processes on sequential Stages since its helps businesspeople like you to create the action plans as opposed to morassing into useless details and deluges of advertising materials.

Stage 1: Choosing the payment gateway

At this Stage, you should consider the inputs that your business already has on its hands. The CMS you use, the coding language you favor, the predilections your internal coding team has.

Although it might be tempting to “command” all of those factors to step in line with your decisions, it might hardly work and you might find yourself fighting the futile battle against adverse and multi-vector circumstances your business lives with.

The best approach is to break the process into two Sub-Stages:

1. Long List

Create a long list of options you come across and compare them based on common-sense indicators, such as team’s communicativeness, quality of coding they offer and overall pricing terms.

At this Stage, you should avoid “going too far into the reeds”.

2. Short List

Now that you’ve taken out many teams who either don’t take the time to answer your queries or who don’t assure the highest quality of underlying coding architectures, you can start “sweating the small stuff”.

Importantly, it might make sense to stop comparing the offerings directly and just consider the specific supplier as is.

Traditional payment gateways offer standard features. More agile players, like our payment system exactly.com, enable more flexibility and functional versatility. For instance, our customers win from +150 currencies processor, integratable accounting and mass-payments system, as well as fee-less intra-system digital wallets for frequent buyers. We are a unique system on the market.

When you deal with uniquely positioned systems like ours, it makes more sense to just side with one of the companies you like, focusing on building relations and value. Remember, the best offering is the one that meets your unique needs.

Stage 2: Integration in Sandbox

At this Stage, the joint team performs the sandbox integrations. For instance, exactly.com uses its robust API-driven capabilities to assure that all requests and messages are processed in a fast and efficient manner.

It’s at this stage that all kinks are smoothed out, be it solving technical issues, ensuring PCI/DSS compliance, creating the roles architecture or training the key stakeholders on your side.

It’s not only about the technical integration, but it’s about aligning and merging managerial and, possibly, accounting systems too.

For instance, upon integrating our payment gateway, we deliver the robust roles system for you to clearly delineate the responsibilities scopes within your financial management team and avoid potential misunderstandings and conflicts down the road.

Figure 1. exactly.com enables sandboxing both managerial and technical systems for robust payment gateway integration

The sandboxing stage should enable you to fix all problems, find answers to questions and build out the payment gateway that truly suits your needs and wishes.

It’s probably the most important stage within the payment gateway integration process, but, unfortunately, almost all major players offer pre-packaged solutions without any possibility to customize for your unique needs. However, exactly.com goes against the trend with the in-depth customization enabled.

Stage 3: Live Testing

The next stage in setting up your payment gateway is testing it on the domain with live customers.

With exactly.com, it takes the minimum time to jump from initial exploratory negotiations up to live testing on your domain.

It’s paramount to avoid procrastination and wasting valuable time on polishing the product you might never roll out “into the wild”. Create an MVP as soon as possible and start gathering the valuable insights from the feedback delivered by your customers.

After you make some needed tweaks, your first iteration of the integrated payment gateway will be ready.

Stage 4: Feedback Loop and Promotion Loop

After you’ve gone live, you should create a feedback loop. Meticulously gather feedback from stakeholders (customers, employees, partners) and create new iterations on a regular basis (e.g., quarterly). This will help your store keep adjusting and improving the payment gateway you’ve set up, constantly in step with ever-changing predilections and expectations your customers share.

A promotion loop is a cycling process used to raise awareness and deliver the unique benefits your payment gateway offers to the end-customers. Here, you seek to gradually build up the favorable network effect and loyalty from the growing customer base.

For example, exactly.com offers a number of amazing opportunities in this regard thanks to mass payments and fee-less transactioning capabilities.

Figure 2. UI-perfect digital wallet

for fee-less intra-system transactioning

And if you have already integrated the payment gateway at your domain, you might still win from stacking the additional payment processors on top.

For example, you might already use one of the “baseline” solutions from a traditional payment system, convinced that you are “covering all the bases” in terms of payment gateway oomph. However, if you decide to stack a more customizable and versatile solution like exactly.com on top, you’ll expand the set of benefits and payment methods you offer. Stacking payment gateways is slowly growing in popularity with many online stores assembling the “potpourri” of fintech solutions to win from synergies.

Conclusion

Integrating the payment gateway is a highly complex and demanding process. Partnership with one of the major players may backfire due to lack of willingness to deliver customized solutions and only pre-packaged solutions on offer. It makes much more sense to hook up a “baseline gateway” and then stack more customizable solutions like our gateway exactly.com on top. Integrating a payment gateway, you should perform rigorous sandbox and live tests. But your journey isn’t over when you go online. Make sure that you continue gathering valuable insights via the feedback and promotion loops to grow your customer base and market penetration. Reach out to us right now and find out the ways to integrate a highly customizable and versatile payment gateway while cutting your out-of-pocket costs.