By Plato 
If you’re running an organization that takes payments from your clients, offering a robust avenue for your customers to settle up is crucial. But with the multitude of options out there, it’s hard to know what the right choice is for your business.
Many companies opt for payment gateway integration as a solution, streamlining their operations and allowing their customers an easy avenue for payment. But in 2021, there are hundreds of integration options you can choose from, and making sure you know good from bad is crucial. That’s why we’ve put together a guide for what good payment integration looks like for your business and the top things any provider needs to offer.
A Strong API
When it comes to payment functionality, its uses in platforms are as diverse as the platforms themselves. Any integration needs to offer a strong API that can deliver the needs that the integrating organization requires, as well as being able to support commonly used languages.
Crucially, as well, it should be simple to use. That’s what it’s all about, right?
Recurring Payment Management
Recurring payments are a huge source of revenue for many businesses, and making sure your payment integration API contains functionality that supports these is paramount. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that some SaaS organizations integrating payment gateways will prefer to use their own app to organize and schedule repeat payments. Despite this, the capacity to manage them through a payment gateway is a sign of good integration.
On-Demand Integration Support
Sure, you’ve got a good API. But what then? If your payment gateway integration doesn’t have expert technical support from the team that implemented it, you could be in for a rocky ride. Things can go wrong fast with payments, and when you’re dealing with people’s money, you want to make sure support is on hand.
Omnichannel Capabilities
Modern consumers aren’t sitting at their computers every time they make a transaction – these days, integration methods need to be able to be supported on a multitude of devices, including smartphones, tablets, and specialty devices.
To add to this, payment gateway integration should support a multitude of payment models. What use is a payment gateway that only supports ACH or credit cards, for example? Good payment gateway integration should be able to do it all.
Strong Reporting
You need to know what’s going on with your business, and high-end payment gateway integration will offer diverse ways to access reporting. Top integrators will offer an online portal with a dashboard for you to check out your reports, ideally with a search function. Batch or live reporting through webhooks may also be on offer.
Data Protection
Payment data is sensitive data – and your gateway partner should be protecting it. Good payment integration (demonstrated through PCI level one certification) will tokenize private data, meaning that only a reference token is visible, giving your customers (and you) peace of mind.
Certain integration models are able to bypass the integrating businesses servers entirely, transmitting straight to the gateway. This can offer further stability.
Other Considerations
One other thing to think about is speed – how fast is your gateway? A sub-one-second response time is ideal. In addition, check out the uptime record of your integrating partner – if they don’t have co-locations or backup functions, you could risk a patchy experience.
What’s The Worst-Case Scenario With Payment Gateway Integration?
A good payment gateway integration partner should offer platforms a secure and fast channel to receive payment information.
Bad payment integration, however, can come with a host of problems. Not doing diligent research into a payment partner can mean that you end up with integration that is unsupported, slow, confusing for your customer, or simply doesn’t have enough payment options for your customers (a particular culprit of this is payment gateways not incorporating ACH processing, vital for recurring payments). All of these, understandably, lead to frustration for your customer, potentially leading them to look elsewhere – and meaning that you lose business.
In the worst-case scenario, data can be compromised by patchy payment gateway integration. Not only can this be a huge risk for both your customers and yourself with regard to fraud, but could spell disaster for your platform. A lack of insight into ACH payments is also a particular stumbling block for payment integrators; the lack of ability to reconcile and report on payment deposits quickly leads to issues and a patchy experience. Look for payment gateway integration that offers this.
The Bottom Line
Looking for robust payment gateway integration is a must for any growing SaaS platform, and it’s important to separate the good from the bad. To discuss more options around payment gateway integration, contact Agile Payments today. For two decades’ worth of experience in the payment world, we know what you need for your business to thrive.