Accepting Payments On Your Website

If you have a website or are in the process of building one, and intend on selling products or services on the website, the question will no doubt arise how you will accept payments. While many things on the web have advanced greatly over the years, payment processing and online payments have pretty much stayed the same. Granted, there are more players in the game, and yes, costs are coming down. However, the concept of online payments has relatively stayed the same.

Hosted Payment Pages

A hosted payment page is a page that does not exist on your website. Instead, your website redirects your shoppers to a page on your payment gateway's website, your customer pays on your payment gateway's secure website, then is transferred back to your website once the transaction is complete. Your programmer sets your website up to 'talk' to this external service so that you know if the order went through or not. While this order flow may seem a little convoluted, it is by far the easiest to setup. With services like PayPal, you can plug in their cart and payment buttons within your website, and be accepting payments in a few hours. If integrated properly, the order flow can be fairly seamless, and most of the time the payment form on the external website can be customized to fit the general look and feel of your website. Another benefit is that the security onus is on the payment gateway, not you. Since transmission of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, is performed on the external payment processor's website, you are pretty much absolved of having to worry about card number security, SSL certificates, or any of the other concerns when you are accepting payments right within your website.

So, with all these great things about hosted payment pages, why isn't everyone using them? I think the biggest reason why people don't use a hosted payment page is control. A very common complaint among website owners is that they get 'abandoned carts' when the user is redirected to another website. What this means is people sometimes don't complete the payment when redirected away, mainly because people get confused about the redirect. Customizing the payment page to look like your main site is a good way to minimize this but you will still find an increased cart abandonment rate with hosted payment pages.

Integrated Payment Pages

Integrated payment pages are payment pages that exist right within your website. So, in contrast to being redirected to an external website when it's time to enter your payment information, your customers pay right on your website. When the user clicks the pay button, the payment information is sent behind the scenes to your payment gateway, and the gateway sends back a message indicating if the payment was accepted or not. No redirect happens, and the order flow is totally up to you. By far, this is the most common and expected way to pay for something online, however it is not without downfalls.

While integrated payment pages are the most common, and honestly the recommended way to accept payments, there are additional costs involved. Typically there is an upfront fee that you must pay to get your merchant account setup, and often times there is a monthly fee to keep your account active. Another additional cost is your payment pages must be secured with an SSL certificate. SSL certificates encrypt the communication between your computer and the server that your website runs from. This way, hackers can't listen in and steal your credit card information when making a payment. Keeping your customer's data is your responsibility when using integrated payment forms, and it's something that cannot be taken lightly.

So, after all this information you might ask what I recommend? Personally, for professional websites, I prefer integrated payment forms over being redirected to a hosted payment form. I think you will find that the majority of non-hobby site owners will bite the bullet and pay the extra costs for integrating right within the website to maintain that professional feel as well as reduce the chance of cart abandonment.

Accepting payments on your website is an important decision that I have only really just touched on in this article. If you have any questions regarding this or anything else, feel free to send me an email at sharbel@wiredsolutions.ca or call me at 519-250-7786 ext 200
or toll free 1-877-549-4733 ext 200.
* Sharbel Lutfallah is the lead developer at Wired Solutions, and has been a web-developer since 1998.