If you are looking at setting up your online business in Malaysia you can't make do without the convenience of having a payment gateway. For those who don't know the difference between a payment gateway as compared to those sites that provide you an account number and ask you to do a bank transfer before delivering, the latter does not make your online business a totally e-commerce platform and is convenient for your customer.

A full e-commerce enabled website does not require its customer to go away from the site and then login manually to their banking site to do an online transfer to your bank account before coming back to tell you that payment has been made showing you the proof of payment. At the point where you ask them to do so, you would have some dropout from the buying process. Also, imagine that you have many orders coming in at the same time, you might be overwhelmed and kind of mixed up with orders and payments for your customer. This is why the need for a payment gateway for your e-commerce site. After adding items to their shopping cart, they can just check out and with a click of the pay button, they would reach the payment gateway where they can choose to pay by creditcard or fpx. When payment has been successfully made, your website would automatically the notification and the order you received would be tagged with the payment details. This would enable the smooth transition of getting you paid for the order immediately when the customer decided the checkout the order.

So what criteria should we look for when choosing a payment gateway in Malaysia?

Pricing and Other Fees

The most important criteria would be the fees and charges for using the service. This would eat into your margin and could potentially reduce your earnings if the fees are extremely high. You need to know the margin you are getting before comparing it to the fees and charges that the payment gateway is charging to know if they are the right one.

Security

Security is also a key feature of the payment gateway. Your payment gateway should have all the security protocols in place and should be compliant with local regulations. Are they registered with Bank Negara and are they compliant with PCI DSS? You do not want your payment gateway telling you that fraud happened and you have delivered the order. Also, you do not want your customer to complain that buying from your website costs them their creditcard information has been stolen or card cloned.

Reliability

Would this payment gateway always fail or not be available when customers need to make a payment? This would definitely give your customer some bad experience and stop buying from you.

Supported Currencies

Do they support the currency that you are selling in? If you are selling in multiple currencies for overseas countries, you would need a payment gateway that can support you in this manner.

Developer-Friendly

How easy could it be to integrate it into your website? Would it require a lot of technical knowledge or plugins that you need to buy before it would work? All these could cost extra development fees for your business.

Conclusion

Having the right payment gateway is essential for your e-commerce website. They can help to ensure if your customer is satisfied with the buying process or not. A slow and difficult payment process can cause you to lose customers and they would never come back again.

Not all payment gateway are the same so it is important to choose the one that can best suits your business model.