The security of your online transactions is paramount when it comes to earning your customer’s trust and convincing them to part with their hard-earned money. One bad experience can be devastating for your business reputation and will guarantee that you will never build a loyal base of return customers.

From a user experience point of view, using a high-quality payment gateway option will also help to reduce your load times. This is important if you want to hold your customers’ attention and prevent them from clicking away before the transaction has been completed.

High abandonment issues can really hamper the success of your online store, but this can be resolved by ensuring the quality of your payment gateway. But how do you choose the right one for your business that will be quick, efficient and ensure the security of your customer’s data?

Let’s take a look at the best options on the market right now when choosing the best payment gateway option.

A payment gateway is a merchant service that takes a card payment from a customer shopping online on any e-commerce website. They also work with brick and mortar stores to take card payments at the bill.

The most popular and well-known payment gateways include PayPal/Braintree, Stripe, and Square. To make it easier to understand, imagine that a gateway merchant is a digital cash register taking money electronically from your credit or debit card. What makes payment gateways secure and helps them to protect your customer’s personal and financial data from hackers is their use of digital encryption between the customer’s browser and your online store’s server. Each individual customer transaction will be encoded for private use, so the data contained can only be shared between the customer and the seller. Each encrypted message will contain an authorisation request for approval from a credit card company or bank to proceed with the transaction. Once the authorisation is granted, the payment fulfilment will take place.

Three top examples of payment gateways

The leading and most well-known payment gateways currently in use today are PayPal, Square and Stripe. Below, we look at why they are such good choices for anyone setting up a new online store or marketplace.

PayPal is a leading payment gateway because it has been around for years, and so many customers trust in its long history. As you start your business, you can use the free PayPal checkout payment gateway to keep costs down. But as you grow your business and need to personalise your payment options further, you can move to a paid option with much more customisation. You get built-in fraud protection without any extra charge. You will need to pay processing and transaction fees, but these are very reasonable.

Square is a payment gateway and credit card processor that offers excellent versatility for both online and in-person consumer shopping. This is an excellent choice if you sell products both on and offline through a brick and mortar shop. Square is a mobile payment company that has created solutions for businesses of all sizes. The Square payment and POS app has been downloaded by more than 33 million individuals and has more than two million active sellers. Square has no fixed monthly costs and is a cost-effective option for anyone wanting to keep their overheads down.

Stripe has become a popular payment gateway in recent years because of its focus on mobile e-commerce. If you plan on building your own online marketplace, then Stripe is a good choice because it can handle many transactions at once. Stripe has excellent stability and works smoothly to process shopping carts without delays. It has been used by thousands of online traders for several years and has earned a trustworthy reputation. It also works with all currency types, credit card types and banks, so it is an excellent option for those offering products globally. There are many other high-quality, trusted payment gateway providers that you should consider, such as Apple Pay, that now can process payment using Face ID and Touch ID. Apply Pay is also widely accepted by a growing number of retailers, so it may grow in popularity over the next few years to overtake current market leaders such as Square and Stripe for processing online transactions.