In order to capitalise on the growing involvement of Portuguese consumers with online shopping, thousands of businesses have migrated to E-Commerce.
Naturally, entering this brave new world of online sales is made up of challenges and one of the main ones is related to the means of e-commerce payment. How receive payments online is one of the most recurring questions for businesses that want to boost their sales with the opening an online shopBut the process is simpler than you might think.
The solution is to entrust the acceptance of online payments to a e-commerce payment gateway.
Payment gateway: what is it and how does it work?
Just as a automatic payment terminal (TPA) helps, for example, a hypermarket to receive card payments, an online payment gateway ends up doing roughly the same thing, but with the same costs. e-commerce payments not only credit and debit cards, but also digital wallets.
In practice, a payment gateway is the term used to describe the interface that enables the processing and transmission of payment data between your online business (with or without a website), customers and banks.
Let's use a practical example:
Let's imagine that your online shop sells clothes. The customer adds the items they want to their shopping basket and prepares to check out (finalise the purchase with payment). At this point, the customer has to provide their details and choose a payment method to complete the purchase. When they choose to pay by credit card, for example, and complete the transaction, the payment gateway comes into play, allowing the payment to be processed by contacting the card issuer and checking the validity of the data the customer has transmitted. If, at the end of this process, everything is correct, the purchase is truly finalised.
Advantages of using a payment gateway
Although it requires an initial investment, using a payment gateway for your online business has many advantages. To wit:
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Greater security
Security is a determining factor in strengthening the relationship between your business and its customers. With a payment gateway this aspect is safeguarded, since your customer's data is protected by advanced firewalls and data encryption systems.
What's more, as these online payment methods come with anti-fraud systems installed that analyse all payments made, the protection added to the purchasing process is strengthened.
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Increased sales
Failures or redirections to another payment site during the checkout process are responsible for high rates of customer cart abandonment before the transaction is finalised.
Since the gateway is integrated into the e-commerce platform and makes the direct connection between the page and the bank, the customer does not need to leave the page to complete the payment operation.
In addition, as we saw earlier, this online payment interface offers a wide range of means (credit/debit card, digital wallets, payment by ATM reference, etc.) for the customer to complete the purchase, thus helping to increase the conversion rate of visits into purchases.
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Reducing costs
Even if you have to make an initial investment, in the long run opting for a payment gateway will prove beneficial to your business. In fact, the best online payment gateways in Portugal have no membership costs and offer a monthly fee.
What's more, as the gateway charges according to the volume of sales and as we've already seen that sales are leveraged with this type of interface, the business wins in the end.
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Simple and fast integration
The integration of these gateways is simple and quick, depending on the interface you choose, with any online shop.
REDUNIQ E-Commerce: the secure and uncomplicated payment gateway
Talking about a payment gateway in Portugal is synonymous with talking about REDUNIQ E-Commerce.
Developed with businesses in mind that want to turn their website into a professional digital shop and receive online payments, REDUNIQ E-Commerce allows you to accept online payments with debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard, by MB WAY and Multibanco reference, with no membership costs and a monthly fee.
The way it is used follows the simplicity of its integration. At the time of payment, the customer is directed to a Unicre payment page where they have to enter their card details so that the issuing bank can validate them.
Once the payment has been validated, the money will be credited to your account in just two working days from the date of the transaction. Please note that during the entire process, the merchant never has access to the customer's bank details.
Advantages of the REDUNIQ E-commerce Payment Gateway
- It allows you to accept online payments with cards from the main international issuing systems (Visa and Mastercard);
- Accept payments by MB WAY and Multibanco reference;
- Simple and fast integration with technical support from REDUNIQ's team of experts;
- There are no membership costs;
- Tuition fee offer;
- It allows you to manage your sales;
- Greater security: transactions are always verified and validated by the issuing bank and the merchant never has access to the customer's bank details;
- Easy integration with the main e-commerce plugins on the market.