When you have a store online, the most fundamental thing to take into consideration is offering a secure way for your customers to pay. Secure not just for you, but mostly for them. Trust is essential when somebody is going to make a payment through your site.
Picking the right ones is generally a balancing act, however. You want to provide enough options for your customer to have a choice and not click away for lack of a suitable option. At the same time, you need to make sure that the fees for accepting these payment providers won’t be so high that it cuts into your margins.
In this article, I will go over some of your best options when it comes to accepting payments online for your ecommerce store.
1 – Cryptocurrency
One of the best benefits to having your store online is that you have the entire world as your marketplace. Your customers can be anywhere in the world. The problem, usually, is handling foreign currency and payments. It usually is not worth the effort and expense to have options for those abroad.
With bitcoin, you never have to worry about that. With a digital wallet, you can accept cryptocurrency from anybody without needing to pay a middleman to convert the payment. You accept the coins into your wallet and that is the end of the story. Fees are also very low compared to other payment providers who take their cut as middlemen.
Then, there is the benefit that you could also make more money from the transaction if the coins gain in value while you have them in your wallet. If you are risk averse then you can convert bitcoin to cash right away, but if you want to take a chance you can see if you gain any value from your cryptocoins.
2 – Paypal
Paypal has been around for a number of years and as such is widely trusted and makes a great option for people to pay. People without credit cards love to use it since it offers a lot of protections for consumers in case of a disputed transaction that many debit card holders don’t have due to their bank not offering them.
And this also works in favor of the seller if there is a transaction that doesn’t seem legitimate.
Like with bitcoin, Paypal is international and can be used in many different countries to process payments if you have an international presence.
The biggest problem with Paypal is the high fees, however.
3 – Google checkout
The world’s largest internet company is of course going to make a splash in the ecommerce world. Google Checkout is the answer to Paypal and is very convenient.
Since just about everybody has a Google account, it is very easy to set up a wallet and make payments seamlessly. The fees are generally lower than Paypal and go down with volume as you use it to do more of your shopping.
