What is a Payment Gateway?
A payment gateway is essentially a tool that allows people to purchase online. It handles all money transactions for an online store.
When a customer adds the product to the cart, fills in the address, and starts filling in the payment information, and then the payment gateway steps in. It will make sure that the payment information is processed securely, and the funds are deducted from the visitor’s account, then take care of the deposit, so you will be able to withdraw it to your bank account. The payment gateway often takes a small percentage of this transaction as a fee for their service.
Things to Consider Before Picking a Payment Gateway
When choosing a payment gateway for your dropshipping store, you can’t just pick one and expect it to work. Some payment gateways don’t even support the dropshipping business model. So here are things you need to think about before you get started.
1. Does it work with your target market and their currencies?
The first thing to consider is which countries you will be selling to. Make sure to check that your payment gateway supports those countries and also supports all the currencies used in those countries.
Ideally, you should pick the most well-known payment method in your target countries or areas.
2. Does it support dropshipping?
Some payment gateways will reject you once they find out that you are doing dropshipping. Because normally dropshippers get more chargebacks than other businesses, thus dropshipping is considered a “high-risk” group. For this reason, some payment platforms don’t want to do business with dropshippers.
3. The transaction fees
When dealing with large volumes of orders, an extra percentage point in transaction fees can impact your profit quite significantly. So it’s best to compare the service fees before you make the final decision.
5 Recommended Paying Methods
1. Paypal
Paypal might be the most popular payment gateway for both dropshippers and the general public! Although not always perfect, the fact that many people know and trust this payment provider makes it a great addition to your dropshipping store. It’s available in more than 200 countries and supports 25 currencies, supports all major credit cards, and requires no startup cost or monthly fee.
The cons about Paypal are that the transaction fee is relatively high and rumor has said the customer service isn’t that good.
2. Shopify Payments
If you have your online dropshipping store on the Shopify platform, this is definitely the payment gateway to set up! It integrates with the Shopify platform completely, in just a few clicks, you are done with the setting.
Shopify also has made its own payment gateway app called Shop Pay, which can be activated through Shopify Payments.
However, Shopify Payments deducts 15$ for each chargeback you get, but if you win the chargeback, you get it back. Also, it’s not available in all countries and is only available on Shopify.
3. Stripe
Stripe is a popular alternative for Paypal. It also has strong partnerships and integration with Shopify. It’s US-based and currently available for businesses in 40 countries. It has a modern user interface, flexible and customizable, supporting over 135 currencies.
But Stripe requires a little programming knowledge to customize, the transaction fee is similar to Paypal’s – not very cheap.
4. AmazonPay
Everybody knows Amazon, the giant technology company that just doesn’t stop growing. Amazon Pay is its own payment gateway, which means that people who are familiar with the brand will trust it. In the US alone, Amazon Prime already has 112 million users, and it’s growing every day. Amazon Pay is convenient, consumers can just log into their Amazon account and use their pre-saved payment information to buy their products.
However, there are still cons: Amazon Pay shares the same level of transaction fees as Paypal. If you are not a Shopify store owner, then you need to have some programming knowledge to set up Amazon Pay on your online store. And sometimes, you will have to pay extra fees like domestic processing fees and cross-border processing fees.
5. Google Pay
Google Pay is another trusted and well-known payment gateway, if you’ve ever used Google Pay yourself, you will know that it is a very fast, easy, and convenient payment method. With low transaction fees, it also can save your credit card on your Google account, which makes paying online faster.
Although it’s cheap and convenient, for some phones and countries, the features of Google Pay are still limited, and the number of people using Google Pay is still relatively low.
Conclusion
To sum up, find out which countries you would like to sell to and what the most popular payment methods in those countries are. Then pick the most popular payment methods like Shopify Payments or Paypal. If you have trouble with those, you can always try and test some of the smaller ones.
Also if you are just starting up, try not to look at things like pricing too much. The most important thing is to make sure your customers are able to pay in their preferred payment methods, some extra transaction fees will actually get you extra sales.
