Relying on only one payment partner could be risky. Nobody is immune to outages and downtimes, unfortunately. According to Statista, only 6% of businesses did not experience an unplanned outage in 2019. On the other hand, 20% experienced it twice a year and 61% experienced it more than twice a year.
The issue of the outage is especially important for a rapidly expanding business because every minute of downtime results in financial loss and reputational damage. Integrating multiple payment gateways assists you in avoiding it and ensuring operational continuity at all times.
Apart from this, there are numerous other reasons why online businesses use multiple payment gateways, which we will discuss in this blog. However, first, let us understand –
Recommended Read: Growth of Digital Payments in India: 5 Factors That are Driving it
What does having multiple payment gateways mean?
A payment gateway is a technology platform that securely collects and transfers payments from customers to merchants or businesses.
Multiple payment gateways denote that a merchant provides several online payment gateways on a single website. It means that users can use an alternative payment method if any online payment gateway has a low success rate or is experiencing downtime. As a result, your company’s transaction success rate will improve significantly.
Top 5 Benefits of Multiple Payment Gateways
With multiple payment gateways, customers can use an alternative payment method if any online payment gateway has a low success rate or is experiencing downtime. As a result, your brand’s rate of successful transactions will increase.
As previously stated, integrating multiple payment gateways has advantages. Let’s check them out! Perhaps it will assist you in making a more intelligent choice for your company.
1. Boosts customer satisfaction
Nothing beats achieving customer satisfaction for a business. Fast-growing businesses thrive by providing an excellent customer experience. Customers who come back and endorse a service expect more than just a fair price.
Accepting payments is a critical component of a good customer experience. Transaction declines and long approval latency times can erode goodwill and lessen customer lifetime value.
Furthermore, the failure to accept payments in the way that customers prefer can lead to long approval latency times, or even a lack of customer-preferred payment methods altogether, all of which add to a bad customer experience.
To provide a great customer experience, you must reduce false declines, reduce latency, and ensure that customers can pay how they want. By offering multiple payment gateways, you can boost your customers’ trust in your brand by offering more than one payment gateway that ensures every payment goes through.
2. Enables multiple payment options
Buyers typically have a preferred payment method that they use to make payments. Some people prefer UPI, while others are more comfortable using a credit card, and still, others always use their e-wallets. In recent times, BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) is also gaining popularity among consumers.
According to the Baymard Institute, 9% of online customers abandon their shopping carts because of a lack of payment options, and another 4% leave if their credit card is declined at the checkout.
Having a good selection of all popular payment methods available at the checkout is therefore highly recommended and a wise online business strategy.
It can be done with one payment gateway, but it may not have some options that the other payment gateway may have. Usually, different payment gateways offer exclusive payment modes which others cannot offer.
For example, popular payment modes like the Paytm Wallet and Paytm Postpaid will only be available on the Paytm Payment Gateway. Having all of the available options and features efficiently builds customer rapport.
Recommended Read: Perks of Supporting Multiple Payment Methods to Receive Online Payments
3. Offer a sense of security
Security of customer data is a payment gateway’s number one priority. After all, that is the primary function of a gateway – encrypting and securely transmitting customer data. So, before you sign up with a payment gateway, make sure it is PCI compliant. You are in charge of your customer’s data.
Merchants can use a variety of payment gateways. And, unfortunately, some of them will not be around in the long run. Storing card data outside of the gateway, or in a backup vault outside of the gateway, offers tremendous security and flexibility for your team to switch gateways if necessary.
According to the Baymard Institute’s survey, 19% of customers abandoned their carts because they did not trust the website with their credit card information.
Apart from actual card data security, offering multiple payment gateways gives your customers a sense of security. Customers will trust you if you have multiple payment gateways.
Trust in specific companies, such as Paytm, is transferred to you via simple association. The more payment gateways you use, the more professional, legitimate, and trustworthy you appear.
4. Use as a backup when one payment gateway is down
Payment gateways occasionally experience problems, which is not uncommon. Transaction declines can rise dramatically when this occurs. A worse scenario could be a complete outage that prevents any transaction from being processed.
It means that if a new subscriber attempts to sign up for a subscription, they will be unable to do so – and they may never return to try again. You lose not only their initial purchase revenue but also their recurring revenue in the future.
This revenue loss can be especially devastating for businesses that handle a large volume of transactions in a short amount of time.
If you have a secondary gateway configured, you can route transactions to it when your primary gateway experiences problems or outages, guaranteeing that any new sign-ups or renewals are successfully processed.
5. Improve the transaction success rate
Some gateways may provide higher transaction success rates for specific transactions based on where the transaction originates. Alternatively, one gateway may outperform another for one-time purchases or renewal payments.
You can run A/B tests with multiple gateways to see which one has a higher success rate for specific transactions. Then, to minimise declines, route transactions to the respective better-performing gateway.
6. Simplify transaction reconciliation
You can route specific transactions to different gateways if you have multiple gateways. For example, you can always choose to route a particular product line to one specific gateway. Doing so also simplifies the financial reconciliation process when different businesses or product lines need to be reconciled separately.
On a concluding note
People like choices and control, especially when it comes to online payments. And a significant percentage of them abandon their carts without hesitation if their preferred payment gateway is not available.
They are more likely to buy from an online store that accepts multiple payment methods. Offering only one payment type will hamper your chances of increasing sales and revenue.
So having more than one payment gateway on your online store is a must. And if you are looking for a reliable eCommerce platform with an equally trustworthy payment gateway partner, you can click on the link below to get started.
