Select and Sign Up for a Payment Gateway
A critical piece of the billing and commerce puzzle is signing up with a payment gateway. These are the companies that will help you connect your virtual shopping cart or virtual terminal/POS to the payments infrastructure that facilitates payments made with either a credit card company or bank network. The good and bad news is that there are many gateway providers to choose from. Zuora has pre-integrated with the most popular gateways on the market. So which one is right for you?
What Gateway Features Do I Need?
Choosing the right gateway depends on a number of factors. Providers differ in several dimensions, from rates charged and fee structures, to countries and currencies they serve, to the number of additional services they offer, to the level of effort required to get them up and running.
We often find that smaller companies don't need a lot of fancy features; they just want to pay a fair rate and get up and running quickly to start processing credit cards. As companies grow and start to expand internationally, they consider switching or signing up with another processor for international customers. As you start getting into higher volumes, it can be advantageous to shop around for better rates and to start looking into additional features like credit card updaters or fraud and chargeback protection. One of the key advantages of working with Zuora is that you have the flexibility to quickly switch gateways and processors as your needs change. You also have the flexibility of using more than one payment gateway. For example, you might want to use one payment gateway for customers based in the United States and another payment gateway for International customers.
Gateway Selection Criteria
Choosing the right gateway depends on a number of factors. Gateways differ in several dimensions, from rates charged and fee structures, to countries and currencies they serve, to the number of additional services they offer, to the level of effort required to get them up and running.
Some of the key criteria for selecting a gateway are:
- Gateways supported by Zuora (If you plan on using Zuora for your billing and payment needs)
- Payment methods you want to support
- Currencies in which you will sell, process and settle
- Merchant domicile countries
- Your preferred merchant processors
- Enhanced features, including payment method updaters and fraud and chargeback management services
- Payment $ volume and transaction volume
- Your preference for independent or full-service payment providers (see Payment Gateways for an explanation)
Signing up for a Payment Gateway
The previous section gave you a sense for the selection criteria you need to think about when selecting a gateway. Since we need to balance several dimensions in parallel, and because every client has their own order of priorities for these selection criteria, some of which are subjective in nature, this selection process does not reliably lend itself to automation.
- Where are you (the merchant) officially domiciled (which country)?
- In which countries do you plan to sell your services?
- What type of credit cards do you need to accept?
- What other payment methods do you need to accept? For example: PayPal, Direct Debit (ACH).
- If Direct Debit, in which countries will you support direct debit?
- What currencies do you need to sell within?
- What currencies do you need to process payments in?
- What currencies do you payments to settle in?
- What other gateway functionality do you require? (Fraud services, AVS Checking, Chargeback Management)
- Do you have charge back issues? What is your approximate rate of charge backs?
- How much volume (revenue) do you expect to push through the gateway annually?
- Do you process only card not present (internet/online) transactions or do you require card present (retail) transactions?
Submit a request at Zuora Global Support if you require additional assistance.
Zuora will evaluate your responses and provide you with a list of payment gateway and/or payment processing providers that meet your requirements. We will put you in touch with the right people at various providers to have follow on conversations. We recommend speaking directly with these providers to evaluate the best option for your business.
Changing Payment Gateways
You may decide at some point to switch to a different payment gateway provider. Bear in mind that refunding a customer payment in Zuora may be more difficult if you no longer use the payment gateway that was used to process the payment. Each payment gateway provider sets its own limit on how long it will process refunds after the original transaction - a month, three months, etc. If you decide to change payment gateways, you may want to consider the length of this period and the frequency with which you process refunds.