Choosing a Payments Provider for Your EverWeb Website

Selling goods and services is often one of the main reasons for creating your own website. Setting up your site for e-commerce activities in EverWeb is relatively straight forward. Setting up your online store itself for the first time, though, may lead you to consider a number of factors relevant to your own business and the markets that it is going to serve. In this post, we will take a look at some of the factors you may need to consider and how to implement your e-commerce decisions in EverWeb.

Payments Provider Transaction Costs
When setting up your e-commerce store, the first step will probably be to select your payments provider. This in itself can be a big decision. The most popular payments providers do not charge up front fees, but this is often counter balanced by relatively high fees per transaction. You may want stop around to find a payments provider that offers competitive per transaction fees. The cost of transaction fees many even be of more importance if your business extends beyond your own country. Often transaction fees are higher for non-local transactions, so again shop around before selecting your payments provider.

Types of Payment Allowed
When selecting your payments provider, you will also need to make sure that your customers can pay via the provider. Most payments providers will be able to handle transactions from most credit and debit cards as well as other online mechanisms, but you may need to make sure that all payment types in your local environment are covered when selecting your payments provider. In some circumstances this may lead you to choosing a ‘local’ payments provider rather than a multi-national payments provider.

Payment Provider Features
The other important consideration in selecting a payments provider is that it has the right feature set for your business. For example, if you are selling physical goods, you may need to a payments provider that makes it easy to create flexible shipping rules. Other businesses may rely on a high turnover model to generate profit, thus requiring transaction volume from the payments provider, low transaction fees and flexibility in being able to create discount rules quickly and easily.So, consider what you kind of business activities you are going to be engaged in and check this back against what’s on offer from payments providers.

Is Your Payments Provider Customer Friendly?
One area that is typically thorny for both businesses and their customers alike is the ease of use of payment provider tools. Often for business users just navigating a payments provider website to find the features you’re looking for can be an unnerving and frustrating task. So if possible, try before you buy to see if the payments provider you are interested in has an easy to use app. Generally the problem is that providing a payment app that offers everything that everyone wants, often on a global scale, inevitably leads to the development of complex, unwieldy apps. This may be something that you have to, to a certain degree, accept as it is.

There may, however, be a couple of differentiators to help you may your decision. Customer Support is one important one. How does your payments provider score in this respect? How does your payment provider handle payments disputes for example? The other differentiator comes in the form of the front end your payments provider uses for your customers when they are purchasing goods and services from you. Is this user friendly, and simple and straight forward to use for all customers. It’s important to check that you are happy with all of these things before selecting your payments provider.

EverWeb and Payment Providers
When choosing your payment provider you also need to make sure that it will integrate with your website in the easiest way possible. EverWeb uses widgets to integrate payments providers in to your site. There are three ways in which payments providers can be integrated in to EverWeb:

1. First Party Widgets: EverWeb includes by default two widgets specifically developed to make it easier to integrate with PayPal and Stripe. The aim of the widgets is to make it easy for you to set up your goods and services in EverWeb as much as possible without having to constantly go back in to PayPal’s or Stripe’s websites.
2. Third Party Widgets: These widgets have been developed by third party widget providers. As there are many different payments providers, such as E-Junkie, Shopify, ECWID, Gumroad and so one, some third party developers have created their own widgets for such services. Check out widgets from EverWeb Garden and EverWeb Widgets for more information on the widgets they have to offer.
3. The last option is to use EverWeb’s HTML Snippet widget. This widget allows you to paste code in from your payments provider which generates a link between your website and the payments provider.

EverWeb Payment Provider Resources
There are a number of different resources to help you integrate your Payments Provider in to EverWeb. Checkout the EverWeb YouTube channel for videos on how to integrate payment providers PayPal, Stripe, ECWID, E-Junkie, Shopify and Gumroad in to your site. Also checkout our own blog posts on the provider you’re interested in, or check out EverWeb’s own blogs and resources page for more information.

If you’re interested in a payments provider that we have not mentioned, let us know and we will see if there’s a way in which it can be easily integrated in to EverWeb!