Are There Cheap Payment Gateways?

Payment gateways can help you lessen the frequency and severity of credit card fraud and helps keep you and your customers safe. It’s one of the best ways to ensure your customers can buy safely from your shop, online or offline. 

If you’re wondering how they work, here’s an easy step by step guide:

 

• • Your customer makes a card payment through either a shop’s card reader or their website. The purchase will then go through the payment gateway.

• • The payment gateway will then push the transaction info to the customer’s bank, which figures out the card network and routes the information through to the payment switch.

• • The payment switch then requests the customer’s bank to push the transaction information onto the correct network.

• • Then the bank applies some fraud detection procedures to decide whether this is a legitimate transaction and whether the customer can afford it.

• • Then, the customer’s bank will then decide to approve or reject the transaction and send the customer’s information back through the network to the store and back into the payment gateway.

Essentially, a payment gateway can help you ensure your customers are buying your items safely. This way, both customers feel safe when buying from you, and you will build a reputation as a trusted business. 

With this in mind, we’ll offer you a few options for the cheapest payment gateways available and whether they’re the right fit for you.

What To Look For When Choosing A Payment Gateway?

Choosing a payment gateway can be a daunting task, as you’ll need to consider any fees they offer. The first thing you’ll need to consider is whether they’ll have any set-up fees and if you’ll then have to pay them monthly from there.

Some payment gateways may even have processing charges that include a percentage of the sale or a cost per transaction. 

Then, you’ll need to remember whether they’ll charge you for canceling a contract or even if they charge for currency conversion and minimum spending.

Undoubtedly, these costs will affect the type of business you run, whether you want your business to go global or whether it’s a small e-commerce store. 

Cheap Payment Gateways

PayPal

PayPal is one of the most popular payment gateways. It gives you a payment gateway and processor all in one place, which makes it easy to use if you’re a start-up.

There’s no set-up or monthly fee, with international business costing 4.4% and fixed price depending on which country.

If you already have a payment processor, you can add Payflow to it, which is Paypal’s very own payment gateway. Payflow has two versions, Link and Pro. However, we won’t go into many details about that one here.

With Link, you’ll have a PCI – DSS compliant template which PayPal will host, which can be embedded or integrated with your site. It’s available without any set-up and no monthly fees. 

Stripe

Stripe is another popular payment gateway that prides itself on its ease of use. Stripe is easy enough to integrate into your e-commerce site, and if you have an in-person business, you can get yourself a Stripe Terminal, the company’s own POS system.

Major companies such as Amazon and Shopify use Stripe as their payment gateway. 

Stripe doesn’t have setup fees and is upfront about its pay-as-you-go pricing. Overall, it charges 2.9% and $0.30 per card charge.

Digital wallets are acceptable, so you don’t have to worry about what cards they accept. However, Should you have an international business, they will charge an extra 1% for international cards. 

Amazon Pay

Everyone’s been on Amazon, and it comes as a surprise to no one that they’ve expanded into their own payment gateways. Amazon Pay is steadily gaining traction as an affordable possibility.

Like PayPal, it’s easy to integrate into your website, and it’s not only for those using Amazon either, but it does mean that you and your customers need to be customers already.

Amazon Pay is pretty straightforward when it comes to its pricing. Its charges are based on a flat rate and depend on the location of your business. They charge a 2.9% processing fee for web and mobile transactions and 3.9% for cross-border transactions.

Each of these payments will still have a $0.30 authorization fee alongside this. Using Alexa will cost you more. Even though the authorization fee will stay the same per transaction, its process fees will be 4.0% when shipping domestically and 5.0% internationally. 

It doesn’t have monthly costs or set-up fees. If you find it’s not right, you won’t have to worry about any charges for canceling early.

WePay

WePay is great for small businesses and is the perfect gateway for someone just starting, especially for online businesses.

While it was founded in 2008 to make payment processes more manageable, it gained so much popularity that JPMorganChase noticed them and acquired them in 2017.

They pride themselves on their fraud and protection services and help you increase the revenue of your business.

In terms of card transactions, it will cost 2.9% processing and a $0.30 authorization fee. ACH will cost 1% for processing and a $0.30 authorization fee.

One key thing to keep in mind is that it will charge your customers for credit transactions. It doesn’t have setup or monthly payments, so it’s a good starting point if you want to get set up quickly.

Final Thoughts

These are only a few options for cheap payment gateways, and not all of them will be right for you. It would be best if you thought about the needs of your business and how you plan to progress in the future.

However, the ones I’ve listed are good options for a cheap gateway without worrying too much about monthly costs.

Hopefully, this list will help you understand more about payment gateways. This list should help you find the right payment gateway for you and your business, online or offline.

For extra food for thought, visit our credit card processing resource center.