Everything you need to accept online payments

Generally, checkout is the term for the purchasing process. However, online payment checkout is also a solution that enables online shopping and allows retailers to accept payments online. It’s a place on your website or app where a consumer enters their data to pay. In other words, it is a web page or a set of pages a consumer sees as they proceed to the purchase.

Your checkout’s quality considerably affects the conversion rate, so you should carefully handpick the solution equipped with features and settings needed for your online business. With this in mind, Corefy designed a highly customisable checkout that can be conveniently tweaked via Dashboard to fulfil any business' requirements, regardless of its type, size, and offering.

Let’s analyse the checkout as a process from two perspectives: consumers’ and sellers’.

The online checkout process is pretty intuitive from the consumer’s point. For instance, shopping at an e-commerce website is similar to making purchases at a regular retail store: a consumer picks the goods, puts them into a cart, and proceeds to the checkout to pay. In real life, we pay at the counter. As for online shopping, we use an online checkout — a payment page, where we often have a selection of payment methods to choose from. Once we’ve decided, we’re required to input the information needed to pay with this particular method. It can be an account or credit card number, ID, card expiry date, our full name, etc. The next step is the verification process that ensures security and prevents fraud, and that’s it — we’re supposed to get some receipt and later our order.

It’s a bit more complicated from the sellers’ point of view. As an entrepreneur, you need to open a bank account, an account at a payment service provider, or both. Then, you’ll have to get an online checkout solution and integrate it into your app or website. After that, your company can start selling, fulfilling orders, and collecting online payments. While the latter is usually not a problem, getting a checkout for website may be a hassle.

If you want to sell goods or services online, accept payments for subscriptions to some digital service, or accept donations on your website, you need an online checkout. There are three ways you can get one:

• Create it yourself. For this, your business needs a Development team with expertise in developing and maintaining online payment products. It would require significant resources (time, money, capabilities, workforce). All fees payment providers charge would also fall on your shoulders: per-transaction fee, launch fee, etc. But in the end, you’ll get a tailored checkout solution that keeps you in control of every step of your customer journey.
• Hire someone to develop a checkout for you. Do this if you know for sure how your checkout should look. You’ll have to find a trusted outsource partner and provide them with detailed technical requirements to make sure you’ll get what you need. Same as with in-house development, be ready to bear all the related costs. It is also important to agree who’ll maintain and update your online checkout software in advance: you or the outsourcer.
• Use a ready-made solution by a third-party provider. Third-party professionals can take the development hassles off your shoulders, providing you with a well-honed, secure and fast online checkout solution out-of-the-box for a fair price. Of course, it's essential to do your research before partnering with a third party to ensure they're best in class and trustworthy.

Here are a few points you should take into account when either creating your checkout or searching for a partner with a suitable solution, be it a payment service provider, gateway, or platform:

1. Security and compliance Your partner should take care of tokenisation, end to end encryption, masking, and fraud protection for you. If you want a PSP to host your checkout, make sure they are PCI DSS certified.
2. Customisation opportunities Aside from being simple and eye-pleasing, your checkout should be customised to suit the look and feel of your website. This way, you'll seamlessly weave the checkout process into your customer journey, and a shopper will feel safe knowing that they're transacting with the right retailer. Look for providers that allow not only customising the design but also configuring fields and buttons so that you could fulfil all your business needs.
3. Variety of payment methods Analyse your target audience's preferences and select the reasonable number of methods your customers would actually pay with.
4. Localised experience If you run an international online business, take your foreign customers into account and add local payment options for them along with some of the most popular global ones — for instance, Google Pay, a solution that accounts for 31% of all mobile payments. Consider translating your checkout into multiple languages and displaying the appropriate option for your foreign buyers’ convenience.
5. Simple integration Integration should be fast and simple. The payment services market is very competitive, so there are plenty of offerings that require a minimum time to start accepting payments online. An online checkout can be embedded, modal, accessible through a link, etc.

The fact that your customer reached the checkout doesn't imply a completed transaction. According to a US consumers survey , more than half of shoppers have experienced some technical issue at checkout. A significant number of European consumers reported they had abandoned a complicated payment process in the past. For merchants, this is the right way to increase the shopping cart abandonment rate. But of course, not a single retailer would want that for their project. As for the conversion rate, it rarely winds its way to growth. You should try and optimise your checkout process to make your success rates flourish.

Optimisation features and tools for online checkout systems

• Routing and cascading — these innovative tools route your online transactions most efficiently according to selected parameters, saving time and cutting costs, and automatically reroute them when needed to eliminate declines.
• Tokenisation — one-click transactions reduce friction and skyrocket conversion. The ability to pay in one tap enriches the customer experience.
• Personalisation — display a selection of payment options recommended personally for each of your shoppers. Advanced checkout solutions can memorise the latest and most used methods, as well as shoppers' info.
• Localisation — a checkout can identify and adapt to a buyer’s geolocation, switching to the correct language and displaying local payment options first.
• "Remember me" — show your appreciation to returning customers by eliminating the need for repeated data entry. Empower them to manage saved credit cards and other payment methods.
• Abandoned cart recovery — if your customer forgets to finalise the transaction, it’s great to have their cart automatically taken care of, saving all the items for them to return and proceed.

Having more than ten years of experience in developing and promoting online payment products, Corefy has tested and learned what works best in terms of digital payments. These insights and months of purposeful research helped us to find the optimal balance and bring our own advanced online checkout solution to the market. Contact us to see all the features mentioned above in action and get the best online checkout for your company.