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The Questions to Ask Before Evaluating Payment Processors

Tag: ecommerce

The Questions to Ask Before Evaluating Payment Processors
Mohab Ecommerce 0

The Questions to Ask Before Evaluating Payment Processors

The journey of entrepreneurship is not easy. Your day starts with a fresh challenge and most of your time is spent clearing obstacles. In the meantime, you are unable to pay attention to the small details that might be critical for your business if not taken care of. Choosing a payment processor in a hurry is one mistake that may cost you dearly in future.

Take a pause before you zero in to select a payment processor.

Don’t get swayed by the sweet talks of the sales guy.  Ask questions that will help you choose the right payment partner for your eCommerce business or physical store.
Always keep your objectives in mind and projected data ready, when you start asking questions.

As a business, your business model, priorities, and strategy can be different from other businesses.  So, a processor that works for your neighbor or a friend may not work for you.

To help you with this, we have created a list of things you should check before you give a nod to a payment processor:

 

Additional fee charged 

Processors normally charge a transaction fee, but some of them can also charge an additional fee in the name of a regulatory fee, some monthly fee, compliance or statement fee, etc.

These are charged upfront, but if the cumulative fees cross $200 per year for physical stores and $300 per year for E-Commerce retailers, it’s a red flag. Remember, there are additional service charges associated with the online shopping cart already.

Connectivity or speed of payment

This is a big issue as most of the payment processors use a software known as authorize.net. This software connects your shopping cart with the processor, but in some countries, they use some proprietary software, which may or may not work with your shopping cart and this may lead to connectivity issues. So, make sure that you are able to receive the payment from day one.

User experience

User experience should be good for both the merchant and the payer. The processor should offer robust customer support so that the merchant can handle different issues quickly and resolve the technical issues as well. As far as payer is concerned, payment process should be easy and convenient.

Deterrence against risk

If you are running a business where frauds are frequent, you should partner with a processor which offers excellent risk management capabilities. As the business grows, the probability of fraud also increases, so be proactive.

Share in payment processing fee

E-Commerce companies also get a small share of revenue from the fee that the processor charges for processing payments. This might be small in individual transactions, but when the transactions multiply with sales growth, this can become a big source of revenue.

Robust customer support

Make sure that you partner with a processor that offers robust customer support. They must take care of their clients and respond to their emails and phone calls instantly with a positive mindset.

Feature-rich processor

Sophisticated processors come with several exciting features that enable excellent services being offered to merchants such as “push to debit” solutions so that they can get access to their cash quickly.

Data analysis

Some advanced and sophisticated processors offer data analysis facilities, where in the merchants can see the data and analyze it themselves. It is beneficial from different angles and these features can be used by merchants for monitoring and understanding data for decision making.

Finally, make sure that your processor is known for offering excellent customer support. Check reviews and word of mouth recommendations. All of the above points are important. Analyze your business needs, keep your projections ready and engage in some straight talk.

One right question may alter your destiny for good.

6 years ago
A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part II
Mohab Ecommerce, Guest Posts 0

A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part II

Image credit: Flickr

It doesn’t matter whether you sell services, products, or even just share content with your online audience: any online business is ripe for automation — including yours.

Set out an automation framework to help you scale and manage your automation operations — find out how to do so in part II of our automation series. 

Create an appropriate framework

The main challenge with automation is having the right framework to support your new processes. This means having an all-informed business with robust documentation. Without it, your automation drive will be lost.

You need to embrace:

  • Bots
  • Smart integrated systems
  • Cross-platform and cross-device formats
  • Workflows, processes and tasks — not individual ability
  • Zapier
  • Inventory management automation

Part of successful automation is process management. You can always automate a process.

This is really the crux of the matter when it comes to automation. Do you fancy staying up all night, packing the latest orders of your store? Or manually having to schedule every single blog promo piece for the next 6 months?

I’m guessing the answer is no…

So create a process, automate it, and move on to the more important stuff instead.

A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part II

About the author

Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. Big fan of automation when it comes to content marketing. Helping ecommerce brands and startups scale faster and better.

6 years ago
A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part I
Mohab Ecommerce 0

A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part I

Image credit: Flickr

Do you NEVER seem to have enough time to deal with the important stuff in your business? Struggling to keep up with the demands of becoming a brand publisher?

Wouldn’t it be great to have more time to focus on the strategic elements of your business…?

Well, automation can help you achieve that.

Here are some online automation hacks to help inspire your business strategy reboot — read part I in our blog series now.

Fintech innovations

Let’s start with the financials: after all, every business in the world needs money to keep the wheels turning.

From managing supplier payments to keeping up with the demands of bookkeeping — financial tasks and admin can massively eat into your profit margins.

The trouble with financial tasks is that if they are not done correctly, it could spell disaster.

  1. Financial technology has seen some exciting developments these recent years — from blockchain to cloud accounting, there are so many ways to improve and simplify your financial operations.
  2. Even simple choices like what payment gateway you go for will determine your business’s financial ecosystem. Opt for a system that’s smart and integrates with other services and platforms so that you don’t have to rely on expensive workarounds.
  3. Accounting is a big business overhead, especially when it comes to expenses and taxes. Invest in a smart system that allows you to automatically sync paper receipts into your online finance system.

Martech leads the way

Marketing technology is another ally of automation. Nowadays, there are enough tools and platforms to automate pretty much any marketing task under the sun.

Martech scales up and down, and can be leveraged by organizations large and small. From simple things like automated proofreading to automating your content strategy with HubSpot, there are tools out there that can help you create, launch, and share better content.

Key areas where you need to embrace automation:

  1. Remarketing is a great way to target interested parties — whether that’s website visitors who haven’t converted, or people who’ve engaged with your content. The beauty of remarketing automation is that once you put in the work to create a funnel and populate it with ads, you can just click ‘play’ and let the system do the rest!
  2. Email is a big marketing channel, whether you are in B2C or B2B. Create funnels using services like Pardot (a Salesforce tool) and run your lead generation campaigns more cost-efficiently.A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part I
  3. Social media can be a massive time sinkhole, so be more efficient about it and embrace automated content creation, mass scheduling, and social listening to help you do more. Social media tools aren’t just about saving time — they will actually bring you better results by optimizing posting times, lengths, and formats.

A Guide On How You Can Bring Automation To Your Online Business Part I

About the author

Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. Big fan of automation when it comes to content marketing. Helping ecommerce brands and startups scale faster and better.

6 years ago
How to Quickly Create an Online Store and Integrate a Payment Gateway
Mohab Ecommerce 0

How to Quickly Create an Online Store and Integrate a Payment Gateway

Your ambitious entrepreneurial journey starts with launching an eStore. Before you do that, you need to contemplate which e-commerce platform to choose.  As far as integration of a payment gateway is concerned, you have many choices. We’ll discuss these aspects of setting up and launching an eStore in this article.

While choosing an eCommerce platform, you have the following three options available:
A. Open source software

B. Dedicated platform

C. Software as a Service (SaaS)

Each one of these platforms has different features and you can choose the one that matches your needs.

A. Open source software

The most cost-effective solution for you is to go for open source software, where you don’t need to pay for any license or subscription fee. However, it requires you to have the knowledge of software development in order to install and manage the platform.

If you are not trained in IT skills, you will have to hire someone for all of your updates and changes required to be made on the website.  But, this can be a costly affair as you would have to pay certain charges for hosting, server and certificates.

The other drawbacks with open source platforms include security concerns involved and lack of customer support.

The popular open-source platforms include Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart and Magento. These platforms have different features in terms of user-friendliness, price, security, and integration.

B. Dedicated platform

Another option which is probably not so ideal for startups and small store owners is a dedicated platform. Usually an IT company will provide you a dedicated platform according to your specific requirements and offer tailored solutions for those who are aware of the different functions and features that they would like to have on their website.

It is both expensive and time-consuming and not ideal for startups and businesses on a shoe-string budget. If you have a highly unconventional system of sales and storage, then it’s for you. It’s an ideal solution for big corporations that are keen to offer the best user experience.

C. Software as a service (SaaS)

If you like a platform which you can manage anytime, then SaaS is the right option for you. SaaS has a lower initial setup cost. When you choose this option, you can pay according to the number of transactions.  You can also be charged according to the number of users.
As compared to an open source platform, SaaS offers you the desired freedom. It allows you to conveniently make changes as and when you want.
SaaS is also good for branding and building long term relationship with your customers.

Using an online marketplace to sell your products

If branding and customer service is not on your mind and all you need is to start selling online, then instead of using the platforms and creating your own eStore, use the established marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, or other regional players.

It is extremely convenient and you do not need to invest in marketing, technology and tools. However, there is high competition on these platforms and you need to pay some commission plus the listing fees.

Moreover, you will not be able to provide sufficient customer service, so it’s a bad option for branding.  However, if earning revenue on your online sales is your sole objective, this can be the best option.

Integrating a payment gateway 

If you want to integrate a payment gateway into your online store, you can use the plug-ins such as Zen Cart, Magento, OpenCart, osCommerce, Prestashop and WordPress, etc.  When you integrate a payment gateway, it will automate the payment transaction between the merchant and the customers.
It will also enable the customers to use their credit cards and other modes of payment methods so that they have a variety of payment options. Integration should be easy and payment gateway should provide a robust customer support so that the issues are resolved within a specific time frame without affecting your business.

Choose PayTabs as your payment gateway as it comes with great customer support and standard technologies to quickly and conveniently integrate into your eStore.

6 years ago
Four Pillars of a Solid eCommerce Customer Experience
Mohab Customer Experience 0

Four Pillars of a Solid eCommerce Customer Experience

Is there a thing like loyalty when it comes to online shopping? In a world driven by discounts, sales, comparison shopping and endless scrolling, it is difficult to grab customer attention. The same sellers present their wares across multiple sites. So people move to check each site to see where the particular product is available at the best discount. In such a scenario, does customer experience really matter?

It matters more than you think. Imagine this – discount can’t be a competing factor because everyone is offering a lot of it. What matters then is customer experience. In fact, customer experience is considered to be a product in its own right.

In order to decipher what type of experience your customers are looking for, it is important to understand their journey and understand what they need at each touch point. Most companies try to concentrate on the customer life cycle which is a complex task, especially with omni-channel marketing. Instead, experts now suggest keeping focus on one customer journey at a time.

Here are the four pillars of a customer experience journey

  1. Make it simple to use

Buying from an eCommerce website should not feel like rocket science. You need to make it intuitive for customers to browse through your product range and get to a sale point. Most eCommerce shops follow a set pattern from discovery to the sales funnel to after sales service.

But a new app on the horizon – Elanic, is doing things differently. It has included an intuitive chat feature that allows buyers and sellers to interact before closing the sale. The chat is pre-programmed with common questions from the buyer like quality, size, condition of the product and more. This strategy is also followed by sites like OLX which sells seconds. In addition to the public comment feature, the site also allows customers to make an offer. The whole process is intuitive and automated which makes it easy to handle. Many sellers vouch that this feature has helped them close sales effectively.

  1. Make it personal

This strategy goes beyond knowing your customer’s name and saying ‘Hey xyz’ in your email. According to Campaign Monitor, 96% visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. But they’ve shown some basic interest in what you have to offer and may probably come back if you communicate properly. Use retargeting to encourage users to pick up from where they left off. And don’t forget to inform them when the products they want are on sale.

  1. Stop them from abandoning cart

In 2016, as much as 69% of carts were abandoned! Can you imagine the billions lost because eCommerce portals did not work hard enough to push the sale? Constantly use A/B experiments to test what makes users stick or leave your website. In case they still abandon cart, make sure you send them a customized email reminder to pull them back

  1. Use the right payment gateway

Other than being secure, the right payment gateway will allow customers to pay in their own currency, using the wallet they prefer without making them work too hard. And of course, it should aid express checkout.

Conclusion: Don’t forget to constantly ask your customers for feedback and also incentivize them for providing it. There is no better way to enhance your customer experience than listening to them carefully – after all they are the heroes and champions for your brand.

6 years ago