If you have a website for your Canadian business where you either already accept customer transactions or hope to do so soon, here are some things you need to know.
To accept credit cards on your site, you need to get a payment processing company’s module to tie into your shopping cart. The customer actually sends his or her information to the payment processor via a window embedded into your site, and pays them. The processor takes care of the transaction and then sends the funds to you after taking a small processing fee for the service.
Why trust someone else to process payments for you? Easy: you don’t have to worry about the special vendor relationships, massive infrastructure, data security, financial risk, and many other aspects of dealing with payments, which, frankly, would not be worthwhile to undertake at most companies’ level of revenues.
The great thing is that there have never been more great, business-friendly payment gateways than at this point in time. You just need to find the one that works best for you.
In terms of what you can expect in fees, these gateways are always trying to match each other, so you can expect fairly similar fee structures. As of mid-2020, most offer a fee structure of around to 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for domestic orders here in Canada. For international orders, fees go up for orders originating from the United States, and then follow a per-country fee chart for other countries.
Popular payment processors include:
One key characteristic to keep in mind is that some of these gateways have a plugin that allows them to be embedded directly within the shopping cart of your website. Others, like standard PayPal (as opposed to Paypal Pro), take the customer to a separate page on their own site to complete the payment. For obvious reasons, the former option is preferable as it provides a more seamless checkout experience.
You’ll need to choose a reliable platform that you can trust, but also one has the features that work for you.
Have more questions about payment gateways and integrating them into your site? Get in touch with us!
