The world we live in is forever changing, and one aspect of our lives that is evolving at an increasingly fast rate is the way we work. The major change is a boom in people deciding to quit their 9-5 jobs and start their own work-from-home businesses.
One area that has grown dramatically in the work-from-home boom is people starting their own e-commerce online stores. And this increase in online stores has had a knock-on effect with more demand for secure and reliable payment gateways.
But what exactly do payment gateways do, and how do you find out which is the best one to choose for your own particular business? Here we take a look.
What is a payment gateway?
In short, a payment gateway is a middleman for a buyer to pay a seller for goods or services.
Going into slightly more detail, if a person opens up an online store selling personalized greeting cards, that person would need to be able to accept online payments from anybody wanting to buy any of their cards.
The best way to do this is by using a trusted payment gateway. This way the buyer makes the payment safely and securely through the payment gateway, and after the payment gateway takes its cut, the seller receives the money for the greetings card.
For example, it works similarly to how you might buy goods from a well-known supermarket brand using your debit or credit card. The main difference is that the well-known supermarket brand would be set up professionally to accept merchant payments. While the one-person home start-up business wouldn’t have this technology, or most probably, wouldn’t have the knowledge or expertise either.
Using a payment gateway alleviates the need for knowledge and does the work for the home start-up business. Allowing the business owner to focus more on the products, and the promotion side of the business.
Choosing the best payment gateway
These days, the payment gateways are so sophisticated that they can integrate with the majority of e-commerce shop platforms, enabling anybody to be able to set up their own work-from-home business.
Choosing a secure and established gateway with a good reputation is the ideal way to go. This keeps your business more secure and helps eliminate risk. Eliminating risk is paramount to any new start-up. Another way to reduce risks is within your financial transactions. For example, using bacs payments to pay staff or direct debits is a safer way to carry out transactions. They protect both parties in the transaction and can be set up instantly. In this ever-dangerous online world of fraud, using the most secure methods has never been more important.
Ultimately, the payment gateway that best suits your business will more than likely depend on the market you are operating in. But you can’t ignore security. So when planning your business, you will need to do thorough research into both the most suitable e-commerce platform, and the most suitable payment gateway to integrate with your online business.
