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12 Leading Payment Services for Your Online Business

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PANKAJ
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In order to make a business successful-big or small, it is vital to make the shopping experience easy for your customers. In conventional supermarket stores, such ease of shopping is accomplished by hiring trained staff to help customers. However, many organizations, especially those in the field of IT, are now turning to e-commerce as a viable option for marketing and selling their products and services.

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Simply put, e-commerce refers to the ability to sell your products and services online, using an e-marketplace such as eBay or, even better, your own website!

When it comes to shopping online, trends in India are on a steady rise. More and more users are now using online shopping to save both time and efforts. With e-commerce on the rise, it has become nearly vital for organizations offering their products for sale on the Internet to employ a proper payment system. After all, unless there is a mechanism in place to channel the flow of funds to and fro, you can't expect to make profits, can you?

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Perhaps the most important aspects related to any payment system are reliability, ease of use and cost effectiveness. Unless the system is reliable (and secure), it can't be trusted with transfer of funds. Furthermore, it can't be too complex else it might end up driving users away from your website. And lastly, the commission or service fee charged by the payment mechanism should not, by any means, burn a hole in the sellers' pockets.

In this article, we take a look at some of the major payment systems available for enterprise e-commerce. But before going any further, let's run through some basic info about such payment mechanisms.

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Online Payment Systems — What and How?

Online payment systems, just like any other thing on the Internet, can rarely be classified in rigid terms. To begin with, we shall first attempt to define the common terms used in the process of online payments.

A 'payment gateway' acts as a middle man between the merchant and his bank on one hand, and the merchant and his clients on the other. Thus, if your customer purchases a commodity and pays the amount using his debit/credit card, the payment gateway facilitates the transfer of funds from the customer's card to your bank account (or pays you the amount via cheque, in certain cases). In the process, the gateway deducts a small fee (which is generally a given percentage of the total amount). So, if your customer pays `100, and the processing fee is 1%, you will get `99 in your account.

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A 'payment processor', on the other hand, is more of an anti-fraud mechanism used with card transactions that helps protect both the buyer and seller.

Most payment systems allow two broad categories of accounts — buyer/user account, and seller/merchant account. The names are self-explanatory —the former is for general users, whereas the latter is for those who wish to sell their products and services and receive payments using the payment system account. Of course, there are other 'high-end' accounts too, for large businesses and organizations.

In India, it is mandatory for almost all payment systems to confirm the PAN identity of their users before approving the accounts (some systems, however, allow you to receive small payments of up to `10,000 per month without confirming your PAN). Further more, the current monetary policy in our country does not allow you to spend unlimited amounts of money using your online payment system account (you can, however, link your debit/credit card and spend money directly from that card). Thankfully, there are not many rigid limits on receiving money as yet.

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We shall now turn attention to some of the leading payment systems.



1. PayPal

Unarguably, one of the most popular services when it comes to online payments, PayPal has established itself as a reliable and user friendly mode of sending and receiving money to and from any location of the world. Serving over 230 million users, PayPal allows merchants and organizations to effectively market their products online and receive payments directly to their bank accounts. The fees per transaction depends on the location your customer is in — payments within the same country have no transaction fee attached to them, whereas payments from the European Union will cost you roughly 4% of the total amount, and so on.



Website: www.paypal.com

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2. Authorize.net

Authorize.net lets you accept credit card payments in a fraud-free and secure environment with ease. As a payment gateway, Authorize.net typically runs a series of processes and steps to ensure that the credit card being used to make the purchase is valid and genuine, and at the same time helps protect the identity of both the seller and buyer. It comes with mobile apps and tools for automated billing, etc. In general, Authorize.net charges a monthly fee of $20, plus a processing fee of $0.20 per transaction, and a one-time fee of $99 for the setup. Obviously, it is not as budget friendly as PayPal.



Website: www.authorize.net



3. Dwolla

Dwolla is a rather simple payment mechanism —sending money is absolutely free, and you can receive payments of upto `500 without any transaction fee. Any payment above `500 will be charged approximately `15. Thus, whether you receive `1000 or `10,00,000 —the processing fee is minimal. Dwolla can automatically transfer the received funds to your bank account.



Website: www.dwolla.com



4. CCAvenue

CCAvenue is a payment gateway based in India. You can process money in both Indian Rupees and US Dollars. The mechanism is rather simple, but has all the bells and whistles one would expect from a payment gateway.



Website: www.ccavenue.com



5. PayU India

PayU India is another payment gateway for Indian merchants. It lets you accept payments using different payment options, including credit/debit cards as well as net banking accounts of leading banks such as HDFC and SBI. You are also provided with EMI payment options and payment analytics and stats for managing your online business.



Website: www.payu.in



6. BillDesk

BillDesk is a rather bland payment service that lets you receive and process payments online. Apart from the fact that you can pay directly from your bank account, there isn't much to brag about in BillDesk.



Website: www.billdesk.com



7. 2Checkout

After PayPal, 2Checkout is by far one of the most popular payment services. With a global presence, 2CO lets you process payments from all across the world. For organizations, the merchant account comes bundled with a payment gateway, and you can easily integrate it on your website, thereby enabling you to receive payments from your customers. Plus, just in case you're already deploying an e-commerce CMS on your website, be assured, 2CO supports most major e-commerce solutions. Hence, you will hardly have to make any grand changes in order to integrate 2CO on your website.



Website: www.2checkout.com



8. ePayments Global

ePayments Global is an Indian payment solution that allows you to process payments via net banking, credit and debit cards, etc. Unlike others, where you have to pay on the basis of your transactions, it comes with 'Plans' which you can opt for. For instance, the Azaadi-3 Plan will cost you `18,000 for setup, and `2,700 per year for renewal. There will be a 5.25% transaction deduction rate and you will be entitled to live support. Naturally, PayPal, Dwolla and 2CO are cheaper on first look.



Website: www.epaymentsglobal.com



9. Paysignet

Paysignet is another Indian payment gateway. It offers features such as customizable shopping cart, real time accounts and reporting, support for several payment methods, in-depth whitepapers, and so on. There is a one-time integration fee for Paysignet, followed by the annual maintenance charges on the basis of your plan. It must be added that the interface may look complicated to beginners.



Website: www.paysignet.com



10. Samurai

Samurai by FeeFighters is not your average payment gateway —it is more geared towards developers. In fact, unlike other payment solutions that brag about finances and transactions, Samurai claims its USP to be the developer-friendly aspect —all you need to do is copy-paste 19 lines of code and your payment mechanism is good to go! If you opt for both the gateway and merchant account, you'll be required to pay `1500 per month as the usage fee. If you simply use the gateway, this fee comes down to `550 per month.



Website: http://samurai.feefighters.com



11. BrainTree

BrainTree lets you accept credit card payments from anywhere in the world. It is quite easy to setup and integrate with your existing e-commerce solution, and is also one of the most user friendly payment mechanisms. However, owing to recurrent billing and processing fees for non-US residents, BrainTree is surely a costly option for smaller businesses.



Website: www.braintreepayments.com



12. Stripe

Stripe is a payment mechanism that projects itself as an all-encompassing solution. In fact, unlike the rest, you don't even need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe takes care of everything —from receiving funds from your customers to forwarding the same to your bank account. As a developer, you'll be amazed by the ease of use that Stripe has to offer — you have separate API wrappers for Ruby, Python, PHP and many other languages. Plus, Stripe does not have a monthly fee — you are simply charged 2.9% of the total sum.



Website: www.stripe.com



To Sum it Up...

You can also take a look at certain specialized services that target a particular method of payment. For instance, if you have many customers that use Amazon, you can opt for Amazon Payments (https://payments.amazon.com/). Similarly, if you wish to focus on a particular brand of credit/debit cards, you can go for services like V.me for VISA (https://www.v.me/) or Serve for American Express (http://www.serve.com/).

Along similar lines, if you wish to incorporate support for mobile devices, you can try using mobile payment services such as Square (https://squareup.com/) and GoPayment (http://gopayment.com/). You should note, however, that such mobile payment services generally cost above par with mainstream online payment methods and thus, are worth considering only if you really have a need for them. Also, even though most of them claim to support 'all smartphones', they do not work well beyond iPhones/iPads and Android devices (read: Windows/Symbian phones are rarely supported).

There are many other online payment systems out there, and the above list is just a small selection of the best ones. If you are using any other payment mechanism, feel free to share your experiences with us!

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