My web design business has built a lot of ecommerce websites over the years and when starting each of them one of the first things we discuss with the client is how they are going to take money from the customer. 90% of the time you are going to be doing this for efficiency and you are going to want the whole process automated.
I have found that in most cases either Eway or PayPal or both are great options. In this post I’ll discuss both of these options to give you an idea of whether you want to use one of them or both of them.
2 gateway types
So first off it’s important to understand the main types of gateways.
The first type is a hosted gateway where the purchaser is taken off to the provider’s website to take payment. They don’t enter any credit card information into your website, they just confirm all of their purchases and are sent off to the provider’s site to do the transaction. This means you don’t have to be as concerned with security since you aren’t taking any of the sensitive details but it’s also a little bit more laborious for the customer.
PayPal is a hosted service so the customer comes to your site, completes the order then goes off to PayPal to pay for it and is re-directed back to your site for confirmation. Typically there are a few more clicks involved in this process.
The second type is an integrated gateway where customers enter their details directly on your site and it is all processed live on your site (by communicating seamlessly with the external gateway).
The purchaser doesn’t leave your site and doesn’t necessarily need to know what is going on behind the scenes. The gateway will pass back information instantaneously in relation to the purchase (i.e. credit card rejected, purchase approved etc) and those messages are displayed on your website.
Eway is an integrated gateway and works in this way in that the transaction is handled seamlessly on your sites.
Where is the money going
The other big difference between PayPal and Eway is with Eway the money goes directly into your bank account. With PayPal the money goes into your PayPal account from where you can transfer it into your bank account (which takes time). I have also found that most accounting systems struggle with this and it seems to create an extra accounting burden whether that be extra bookkeeping (MYOB) or confused data feeds (Xero).
Why use Eway
So with that in mind, here are my main reasons for using eway.
- It’s a more seamless experience for the customer.
- The money goes directly into your account for easy accounting.
- Their live chat support is the best in the business.
Why use PayPal
- Because almost everyone has a PayPal account and people can purchase with their account without entering data every time they purchase.
- It’s fees are considerably lower.
- There is no extra security required on your website.
- It’s very easy to setup and pretty much every shopping cart software will run it.
Why use both
No doubt offering more payment options will result in a small increase in buyers. Depending on your budget and the size of your implementation this could be a big increase overall.
Conclusion
I hope you have found this useful, please feel free to comment if you have any feedback on the article. We generally recommend that people start with PayPal because it’s so cheap, easy and universal but over time as the site grows it could be useful to also look at an integrated gateway like Eway.
About the author: Dan Norris
Dan Norris is the owner of A Website Designer, one of Australia’s leading small business web design blogs and founder of Web Circle, a progressive Gold Coast web design agency with a relentless drive to help small business owners connect with real customer online. He also runs ecommerce website design, a blog just for ecommerce topics.
