Integrating payment systems into your online store: best practices

A properly selected payment system allows you to provide comfortable payment conditions for customers, enhance security, and optimise internal processes, which, as a result, has a beneficial effect on sales growth.

Often, you do not even need the help of a third-party specialist to integrate a payment system into an online store. Most services offer ready-made solutions (plugins) that can be set up in just 15 minutes.

Therefore, the main question in this topic is not HOW to set up payment acceptance, but rather WHICH aggregator is right for your business.

Criteria for choosing payment systems

Despite the fact that each project is individual, there are a number of general requirements for online acquiring. In particular, we advise you to pay attention to:

1. Fees and tariffs, i.e. the estimated costs of transactions. They will depend on: the type of payment system, transaction volumes, type and currency of payments, coverage area, availability of additional options, etc.

2. Global coverage. If you are planning to enter international markets, make sure that the chosen payment system supports a sufficient number of currencies and is available in the countries where your target audience lives.

3. Customer service: speed of responses and competence of operators. Read reviews of other businesses that use this system. This will help you assess the reliability and quality of services.

4. Convenient reporting and analytics tools to help you track payments and understand customer behaviour. Consider how easy it is to scale your business with the payment system you choose.

It is clear that the above is only a “minimum programme”. It is equally obvious that we expect the chosen service to have no hidden fees, intuitive interfaces, high security standards, and fast transaction processing.

Guided by these criteria, we have compiled a small overview of which payment systems are best for the successful development of your company.

Fondy

It was founded in 2013 and is based in Ukraine, owned by the eponymous company Fondy Ltd. The company quickly gained popularity in all former CIS countries and is actively campaigning to consolidate its position in the European market.

Advantages:

• no monthly fee, commission from 2% to 2.4% of each successful transaction*;
• a wide range of ready-made solutions (from eCommerce and marketplaces to charitable foundations);
• more than 15 items in the Products section, including abandoned shopping carts, payment holding, one-click payment, payment calendar, etc;
• PCI DSS Level 1 certificate, which indicates high security standards.

Fondy works with most well-known CMS systems, has a convenient mobile application (for Apple and Android), and allows you to generate payment invoices for payment on social networks.

WayForPay

Also founded in 2013, it is focused on the Ukrainian and international markets.

It has a number of interesting product solutions:

• the possibility of offline payment through a coupon code;
• a built-in designer for creating single and multi-page websites;
• the ability to create a bot to answer customer questions and process requests;
• easy issuance of invoices via SMS and e-mail.

WayForPay attracts with a fixed rate of 2%*, regardless of the payment method chosen.

Interkassa

An international payment aggregator founded in 2009 in Ukraine. It offers 70+ payment methods and various services for solving business problems:

• widgets for adding to the website;
• creation of payment links in your personal account for transactions via social networks/messengers/email;
• cashless offline payments;
• creating a calendar of regular transfers.

Interkassa offers individual tariffs for businesses with high turnover and a fixed rate of 1%* for card transactions. As with other services, the integration of payment systems is quite easy.

LiqPay

It positions itself as a leader in the Ukrainian market, which is confirmed by the number of merchants (over 25,000). It is a product of PrivatBank and offers a software-based cash register (payment transaction recorder), which enables automatic submission of fiscal reporting.

LiqPay is one of the few services that publishes requirements for businesses and online stores and conducts a fairly rigorous user verification. You can read the terms of use here.

*all the above data is relevant at the time of writing and is subject to change at any time

How to add payment methods for an online store using the example of Fondy

As we mentioned at the beginning, adding widgets and setting up the aggregator shouldn’t take you much time. Let’s take a look at a specific example (although in almost all cases, you’ll go through the same process).

1. Registration and access to your personal account. You will be asked to provide general business information and bank details.

2. If you don’t have a website yet, you can use the built-in web builder to create one. In this case, the payment gateway will already be connected by default.

3. If you already have a website, use the menu item “List of merchants” and the button Add Merchant

4. To add a payment button to your website, use the menu item with the same name. The system will offer to attach it to one of the available merchandise.

5. Add the generated HTML code to your website.

You can also integrate payment systems into your store using modules and plugins. And finally, one of the most affordable options is to issue an electronic invoice in your personal account (use the menu item of the same name).