International payment gateways are becoming increasingly crucial for businesses of all sizes. However, with numerous options available, determining which one is right for your business can be challenging. In this article, we'll examine the key features to look for in a payment gateway for international merchants and learn how to choose the best one for your needs.
An international payments gateway is specialised software that enables businesses to authorise and accept online credit or debit card payments from customers worldwide. Businesses operating at multiple locations worldwide or with an online presence in more than one country need this tool to process card transactions.
In other words, an international online payment gateway ensures a business can receive money in their bank accounts without worrying about currency conversions or fraud protection.
An international payment solution connects your e-commerce website to your merchant account and allows you to process credit card payments online.
The primary purpose of using an international payment gateway is to allow customers to pay in their local currencies instead of converting them into your currency. The funds are then automatically converted and deposited into your merchant account. This way, you can support multiple currencies for different countries and charge your international customers accordingly.
To sum up, some of the most demanded characteristics of payment gateways for international transactions are the support for multiple currencies, compliance with the world's acknowledged security standards and regulations, global and local payment methods, and several languages.
There are three basic things a business needs to work with card transactions:
These are a must for online card transaction processing. Today, many payment service providers offer all-in-one solutions, but still, there are many cases when businesses have to go for each point separately.
The payment gateway is the middleman between your website and your bank. It's responsible for allowing you to accept payments from your customers, online or in-store, via their preferred payment method.
Understanding how payments move across borders is essential for any business looking to expand globally. Whether you’re using an international card payment gateway or other international payment solutions for business, the core mechanics of multi-currency transactions follow a similar process. Breaking it down step by step helps businesses see where compliance, security, and efficiency play a role in delivering a seamless customer experience.
This process might happen in seconds, but behind the scenes it involves a carefully orchestrated chain of checks and authorisations across multiple international payment networks and international payment processors. For businesses, it's a key to choosing the right payment platforms and ensuring smooth customer experiences.
It is crucial for any business to choose the best payment gateway for international payments. The quality of a selected online international payment gateway will likely affect your conversion rates and your reputation. For example, in case of technical glitches in the payment process, the customer will think it's because of some problems on your side and may not want to return to your website after such cases. So, here are five main factors to consider when choosing a payment gateway for international transactions.
When evaluating providers, businesses should look beyond basic functionality and consider whether the gateway is designed to handle the complexity of cross-border transactions. Leading international payment platforms provide more than just transaction routing—they offer compliance support, fraud prevention, and optimisation tools that help merchants adapt to diverse markets.
For businesses operating across multiple regions, supporting a variety of international online payment methods is essential. Customers may prefer cards in one region, e-wallets or bank transfers in another, and mobile-based payments in emerging markets. A strong gateway should enable easy acceptance of all major international payment methods within a single integration.
Another vital factor is smooth international payment gateway integration. This ensures that businesses can quickly connect their systems to the gateway without lengthy development cycles, while maintaining flexibility to adapt as regulations and consumer preferences evolve. Features such as sandbox testing, developer-friendly APIs, and documentation speed up deployment and reduce operational risk.
Support for international credit card payment gateway functionality is also crucial. Handling different card schemes, currencies, and security requirements requires not only technical capability but also robust compliance with international standards. Advanced gateways streamline international credit card processing by embedding fraud detection, tokenisation, and 3D Secure protocols into every transaction.
Finally, scalable payment services are essential for growth-oriented companies. Whether a business is expanding into one new market or dozens, the gateway should provide adaptable international payment solutions for businesses of all sizes. This means offering reliable international payment processing, settlement flexibility, and transparent reporting that gives merchants visibility into their global operations.
Here's the list of vital criteria to pay attention to:
As a merchant that already provides services to multiple markets worldwide or is just planning the international expansion, you should understand that when customers reach the payment page, they want to see the option they're used to paying with. And if it's not there, it may result in lost sales for you. That's why your payment success largely depends on the availability of payment methods on your website that your international payment gateway provider should support.
Besides supporting the top global card brands, popular mobile wallets, like Apple Pay and Google Pay, international bank transfers, and even cryptocurrency, are worth considering — for instance, Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin. However, you should select the final list of options based on your target audience, markets, and what your company does.
A gateway for international merchants should allow for working with different currencies. Your website should also display prices in the currency of the customer to make the shopping experience smoother for international customers. Some checkout solutions can automatically detect users' location and adapt accordingly, while others allow choosing a currency manually.
As we've already touched on the user experience topic, checkout is the most critical customer-facing element of the payment process that directly affects clients' satisfaction and conversion rates.
Besides being secure and convenient, some of the market's advanced checkout solutions support personalisation features. For example, displaying payment methods that the client will likely use or have used the last time at the top of the list allows them to save payment information and pay instantly in one click.
The solution should also be integrated into your website correctly to avoid basic UX errors like shutting down due to a misclick. UX writing matters, too — all the error messages should be clear enough so a customer can fix the issue if it's on their side.
Same as with the currency, customers want to use their language when shopping. Rare merchants need to speak all languages of the world, but for globally present companies, it's good to have local versions for the world's most spoken languages.
Another vital thing in terms of payments and gateways is security. The service provider must comply with the industry's renowned security standards, like PCI DSS, protect and securely store clients' information per GDPR, and have all the hardware and software needed for fraud prevention, tokenisation, encryption, masking, data protection, etc.
Moreover, an important parameter to look at is a provider's health. Usually, reliable gateways have a status page, allowing customers to see if everything's fine on the gateway's side or if some issue occurred. Don't trust 100% uptime claims without seeing a status page.
Choosing the best international payment gateway solution is one of the most important decisions you can make as a business owner. The right solution will help you sell to a new market, increase revenue and reduce risk.
There are many questions to consider when choosing an international payment gateway. Here are some of the most important ones:
When selecting the best international payment gateway solution for an e-commerce website, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Each country has regulations and preferred payment types, which means the best payment gateway for one country may not be the best choice for another.
Some of the most popular international payment options include PayPal, Stripe, and Square. This can be proven by looking at the company's websites and financial reports. For instance, PayPal had 392 million active user accounts worldwide as of the first quarter of 2021. Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually for businesses in 40 countries worldwide. In its turn, Square processed $112.3 billion in gross payment volume worldwide in 2020.
Still, it's essential to research the local payment preferences for each country you're targeting and select the best payment gateway that fits your customers' needs in that part of the world.
International payment gateways primarily aim to cover the basic needs of merchants with a global presence. Most commonly, providers offer essential services required to operate across various countries.
The downside of them is that sometimes global payment gateways need more localisation. For example, they may fail to support crucial local payment methods of one of your key markets. It's a pity if everything else about the particular gateway suits you.
In such cases, the best solution for businesses that need international credit card processing is to work with multiple gateway providers. Let's say, one offering capabilities for operating across different regions, and a few local ones, knowing specific markets well and fully covering customers' needs in those markets.
Such an approach makes managing payment processes more cumbersome, as you'll have to stay logged into all the dashboards and monitor transaction flow on each of them separately. Still, advanced international payment solutions like Corefy tackle these issues efficiently, providing a single access point and a connectivity hub for all your payment and payouts, saving you time and nerves. It also allows for optimising processing costs using features like intelligent payment routing, softening the burden of gateways' fees. Furthermore, with extensive industry expertise and a deep understanding of the market, we act as your payment team, helping you choose the optimal partners, best payment gateway providers, and payment methods in your targeted geographies. Get in touch to learn about all the benefits of working with us.
