More of us are buying online than ever before. With worldwide eCommerce retail sales snowballing and on course to exceed $4.8 trillion by 2021—optimizing your electronic payment system can give your eCommerce company the superboost it needs to stay ahead of the curve.  

What You Need in an eCommerce Payment System

You need to make payments as fast, secure, and convenient as possible if you want to win customers. We’re here to guide you through the payments wilderness and let you know what to look for in a secure eCommerce payment system.

Grab your backpack and your compass, we’re going on a trip. Trust us, we’re professional #PaymentsGeeks, and can help guide you through your payments decisions.

Easy to Login and Make a Payment

eCommerce payment systems need to offer your customer multiple login options, as no-one likes juggling multiple passwords. Whether you integrate with Google, Facebook, or another popular login provider, the more options you provide, the easier it gets for the consumer—and that means they’re more likely to buy. You’ll also need to store their personal and payment information in a secure way, which means that dreaded word: “Compliance.”

Fully Compliant eCommerce Payment Technology

The two big regulations are PCI DSS and GDPR. You must be completely PCI DSS compliant to take cards issued by the major card networks like Visa, Mastercard, or AMEX. The PCI DSS standard is not a light read, but it’s necessary for you to function and thrive online. eCommerce payment technology should be PCI DSS compliant by default, but you’ll want to check that the rest of your software, hardware, and payments stack is as well.

GDPR is a European regulation which means any organization managing, creating, or processing data from a European citizen must meet certain guidelines. This is mainly around data protection, which brings us neatly to…security.

Completely Secure Online Payments

Very few of us appreciate the enormous scale of payment fraud, but one shocking fact is that global card losses have increased by around 18 percent every year, and reached $30 billion in 2018. It’s a monumental problem. Fortunately, payment technology is catching up and can give merchants, banks, and card networks an edge when it comes to rejecting fraudulent and problematic payments.

Both startups and financial corporations are investing heavily in fraud prevention and payment protection solutions. From artificial intelligence algorithms to machine learning and deep analysis, the focus is on speed, secure verification, and reducing false positives and false negatives. There are dozens, if not hundreds of fraud prevention systems, which means your eCommerce payment system must play nice with others.

Reliable and Fast Integration with Other Payment Software

Merchants like to be able to customize their payment stack. Whether it’s choosing the perfect payment processor or gateway, linking up with your order fulfillment software, or using a specialized fraud detection system, it’s important that everything communicates and works together. This means you should search for an electronic payment system that features out-of-the-box, code-light integration with your eCommerce back office systems. Put simply, it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle to get everything working.

That can go beyond just payments, too. You might want to integrate your stack with Customer Relationship Management, incentive programs, or logistics and distribution. The idea is to automate as much as you can, so you don’t work your fingers to the bone doing everything yourself.

Simple to Incorporate Onto Your Ecommerce Website

Customers have never had more choice, and they're going to be very discerning when it comes to your website. If you’ve spent a fortune on great design and branding, you don’t want to be let down by an ugly payment and shopping cart experience. Ideally, you want to keep customers on your website rather than sending them elsewhere for payments processing, and you want the whole process to feel completely seamless.

Look for an eCommerce payment system that lets you tweak all the little visual elements. Color, size, style, placement, and design all have a subtle influence on how consumers feel about your online store. Make sure it’s easy to incorporate the system into your product and payment pages, and then test everything to ensure it works flawlessly.

And while you’re there, don’t forget about payment options…

Wide Range of Payment Methods

Give your customers plenty of options when it comes to paying you. Of course, you’ve got the old standbys of PayPal, and other providers for your credit and debit cards, but have you looked beyond that? Think about customers who want to use their mobile wallets—that number is growing every day. Do you want to offer cryptocurrency payments, and if so, what coins do you want to take? How about Google Pay, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Samsung Pay and all the other options?  

It’s not just about today, either. Look down the road and think about how consumers will want to pay in future. Be the bold, modern, innovative retailer you are by giving your consumers the payment options they want and need.

Other Features of Electronic Payment Systems

We hope we’ve been trustworthy payment wilderness guides. Before we go and leave you to enjoy things on your own, it’s worth touching on other payment features you might need. Have you considered:

• The user experience across all types of devices? More and more of us are purchasing from our smartphones and tablets, so eCommerce payments need to be flawless across all devices.
• Cross-border and international currency payments? You’ll want to be able to take payments from anywhere in the world that you can ship to.
• Integrated postage and packing? Factor in your distribution and logistics costs if you’re charging for those separately.
• Customer communications? Provide email updates on orders and offer tracking numbers so consumers know when they’ll receive an item.
• Recurring and subscription billing? Because the only thing better than charging once, is charging on an ongoing basis.

There’s plenty to think about when it comes to choosing the perfect eCommerce payment system. Think about everything from the consumer’s perspective.

Are you optimizing for speed, convenience, integration, choice, and security? Put those at the forefront of your thinking, and you won’t go wrong.