Often, the choice of which payment provider to use is a case of which offers the lowest cost, or which offers the functionality that’s required for your business.
Once past these limitations, many payment providers are the same; offering either an on-page or external redirection site to take payment, and returning a secure callback to verify that payment has been taken.
Some of the best payment providers are simply because of their new designs and templates. Many sites are struggling old designs provided by WorldPay and Authorize.net, whilst some sites are using new designs from providers such as Stripe and Braintree.
There are also some great middle-ground offers in providers such as SagePay, and some more unusual possibilities with GoCardless – including Direct Debits. In our experience, most retailers are using one of these, alongside offering the use of Paypal, either directly or through another provider.
There are also some other options which are rarely considered.
For example, Amazon Payments, which uses your existing Amazon account details. Like Paypal, this does not send any security information to the retailer. However, despite its’ popularity, it has a long number of checkout steps, and uses the Amazon site styling.
Apple Pay also offer a website-based payment system, but this is only available on iOS and to Safari users – effectively blocking out Windows and Linux users.
In a similar vein, Google have recently put their Google Pay on Android system live, enabling users on Android Apps and Android Browser to use their very simple checkout experience. Should this come to desktop, this will likely be the one to watch out for.
We’ve worked with almost all of these providers, including writing custom gateway plugins. We’ve previously used GoCardless for Direct Debits, and have a wealth of experience with Paypal and IPN notifications. (Having problems with that? Make sure to change it in your PayPal Account settings!). If you need help, please do get in touch.