Does the payment gateway support new payment methods?

New payment methods are developing rapidly, especially recently. When choosing a payment gateway, you should consider whether the gateway supports all the payment methods you need.

How detailed is their error fidelity?

Error fidelity refers to the detail and accuracy of transaction rejection information. There are over 100 different and very specific reasons for rejecting a deal. However, some payment gateways do not provide such details, instead specifying only a dozen or so error types.

Fidelity of fine-grained errors is important to subscription businesses, as attempts to customize collections can significantly increase the likelihood of successful collections. Therefore, the more detailed the internet payment gateway identifies the reason for rejecting the transaction, the more effectively the billing system can resolve and correct the rejection.

How good is their customer support?

There will always be issues when it comes to processing types of payments such as credit cards, both in business and at the gateway. The major problem preventing payments could prevent a business from getting into trouble, and the gateway needs to get involved immediately, provide a quick remedy, and collect payments again.

Other types of issues can cause significant disruptions, such as abnormally high transaction rejection rates, chargebacks, duplicate transaction creation, etc. Customer support and operations teams can have a significant negative impact on these issues. On top of that, gateways and payments affect potentially dissatisfied and frustrated customers.

When dealing with payment issues, the gateway customer support team often plays a key role in identifying and resolving issues. It's important to understand how the team will work with you to solve problems, their accessibility and responsiveness, and the policies they have in place. When considering a gateway, some things to determine are:

What kind of support does Gateway offer? For example, do they offer phone support or at least chat? Or are you only able to reach them via email? Being able to contact the Gateway support team quickly and easily has a direct impact on the speed of resolution.

How responsive is the gateway customer support team? Waiting for an email response is unacceptable. Many gateways offer formal SLAs describing the required response time, which is an important issue.

What options can be used to track the status of open issues? Similar to the above, an easy way to find the status of an issue can eliminate delays and frustration. Also, if the issue is not resolved in a timely or satisfactory manner, what are the upgrade options? If the gateway is having trouble resolving the issue, a proper upgrade can be very important.

How much can they support your growth?

In addition to how to deal with specific issues, it is also helpful to understand other types of guidance, such as expanding into new countries, accepting new payment methods and other important payment issues or opportunities. These businesses can be very important to the growth of subscription businesses, and portals that provide expertise and experience in these areas can be invaluable.

In addition, processing volumes may increase with growth. If you are expecting a significant increase in transaction volume, it is good to know how this might affect your costs and whether the gateway offers a different cost structure (discount) for higher transaction volumes.

Determine your future business needs and growth potential to provide an opportunity to consider whether adding a second gateway would be beneficial. Multiple gateways allow you to route transactions based on geographic location, product line, and more. It can also speed up financial reconciliation, optimize retries, reduce risk, and ultimately provide potentially critical flexibility to support business expansion.

What is their expertise in fraud management?

Fraudsters are ruthless and enthusiastic, taking every opportunity to steal from businesses, constantly evolving their attack methods. Combating fraud is an ongoing challenge that requires a complex, multi-pronged approach. Gateways can and should be your ally. Ask some questions about gateways:

What tools are provided to identify and prevent fraud? These may be third-party or internal tools.

Does the gateway provide benchmarks for industry, company size, company type, etc.? In order to understand whether your fraud levels are cause for concern, this data allows you to measure your incidence of fraud against similar companies.

They will work closely with you to prevent fraud? Again, fraud is a key issue in CNp transactions. The more help and expertise a gateway provides, the more valuable their services will be to you.

How advanced are their reports and reconciliations?

Subscription businesses rely on payment gateways, banks and credit card companies for revenue recognition and other financial reporting. It is important to know how to provide this information. Some businesses will rely on payment gateway reporting, while others rely on professional insiders who prepare reports using gateway raw data.

Some of the key issues in reporting practice include:

What reports the gateway provides - standard, optional and custom. Are there additional fees or other precautions required to create or receive non-standard or customized reports? If you know you need a more advanced reporting tool, you should make sure any gateway you choose can provide it, at what cost.

How do I access reports? Download or on-demand? How long will they get? If reports are hard to come by, your reporting process will suffer.

Are there tools to search and search for items such as duplicate or lost transactions? Simple ways to find data improves the reconciliation process.

What do they offer in terms of credit card portability?

Sometimes, a business may want or need to switch to a different gateway. In this case, portability procedures and policies for gateway credit card data will become extremely important.

Tools or support for understanding customer and credit card information. Also determine if the process involves costs and how long it will take.

When a business decides to change gateways, it needs to export credit card data from the old gateway. Payment gateways may refuse to export the data because the information is very sensitive. Even if the process is agreed to, it can take months to arrange and cost thousands of dollars in professional services fees. Likewise, the enterprise cannot access the remaining data, and all subscribers' data needs to be reconfigured.

Convenient customers don't have to worry about portability of credit card data. With Recurly, you can easily change payment gateways as your needs grow or change. It's like providing new gateway credentials, choosing a frame, switching transactions from one gateway to another.

Can gateways help with tax compliance?

Tax compliance is another broad area of ​​compliance. As we all know, federal and state tax rules and regulations can be very complex due to jurisdiction. International sales tax, use tax, value added tax and excise tax may also apply. Be sure to choose all payment gateways that are familiar with the tax codes you plan to do business with.