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TEKNOLOGIA
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TUTUSTUE-commerce app
Choosing your payment methods
The classic pattern has your customer ordering in the app and paying online. That's perfectly workable through a payment gateway. But where local delivery is involved, offline payment becomes a serious option.
Nothing forces you to choose: offering both maximizes your chances of suiting the largest number of people.
A word on scope, because the confusion is common. This guide covers taking payment for goods and services in an e-commerce app. If you're selling access to premium content by subscription, you don't go through these gateways: you go through the stores' in-app purchases, which follow different rules and different economics. That model is described in "Making money with your content app".
Chapter 1Online payments
What a payment gateway is
To take payment online, you have to go through a payment gateway.
These are third-party providers. When your customer enters their payment details in your app, the gateway takes care of passing them securely to the payment processor.
The journey happens in three steps:
- your customer places the order and enters their payment details
- the gateway picks up those details and sends them to the payment processor
- the customer is redirected to the processor and completes their payment
The gateway handles collection from end to end and encrypts sensitive card data.
You don't have to master how this works in detail. Your responsibility stops at choosing your gateways and offering them to your customers.
The point to watch
Gateways are third-party services, and they take a fee. Charges can take several forms: a monthly subscription, a fixed amount per transaction, a percentage of the amount collected, or a combination of the three. Some also apply restrictions on the products sold through their services.
So read their terms of use carefully before committing, particularly if your catalog includes sensitive or regulated products.
The available solutions
Stripe lets you take the main bank cards, from customers all over the world, on the web as well as in mobile applications. With it switched on, your customers can:
- pay by credit card
- pay with Apple Pay
Apple Pay works like a mobile wallet and allows one-click payment on the services that accept it. Using Stripe requires a Stripe account.
PayPal is a global real-time payment solution, and one of the main networks used for online purchases. Here too, a PayPal account is required.
The test gateway isn't there to take money, it's there to check. It lets you run a whole order through without any money moving, so you can check your funnel, your confirmation emails and your order statuses before opening the shop. Each payment service also has its own test mode and live mode, which you switch when you're ready.
Chapter 2Offline payments
You can also accept payments outside your application. Where local delivery is involved, it simplifies the purchase journey considerably.
Offline payment is an extension: you add it from the store, where its listing shows the price that applies to your app, and it then switches on among your payment services. Like the gateways, it has a test mode and a live mode.
You reach a wider audience. Not everyone is comfortable entering their bank details online, and those people sometimes give up on the purchase. Offline payment lets them order and pay you in person, on delivery or on collection.
You remove a brake on sales. Paying outside the app is immediately understandable, including by people who struggle with online payment.
You don't depend on any gateway. You can sell online without creating a Stripe or PayPal account. Payments are direct, with no extra charges. That's an argument worth weighing if your volumes are low and gateway fixed fees would weigh heavily.
Once the option is switched on, your customers confirm their order without paying, and settle later, on receipt or on collection.
Chapter 3What the app brings to payment
The payment process is one of the main reasons baskets are abandoned in e-commerce. That's exactly where a Shopping App takes the advantage, thanks to one-click payment.
Apple Pay and digital wallets
With Apple Pay, confirming a transaction takes a single glance. These native solutions pass your customer's address straight to your application and confirm the payment with nothing to re-enter.
The gain isn't only comfort: every field removed is one fewer opportunity to abandon, which reads directly in the conversion rate.
Saved cards and fast checkout
Optimizing your payment page is the most profitable lever against basket abandonment.
Fast checkout removes the unnecessary steps. Your customers only provide the information specific to the delivery method they chose, without filling in superfluous details before ordering. It's an extension, and it rests on Click & Collect: it's because the order is collected in person that the form can be reduced to the essentials.
One-click payment rests on the Payment Request API, which uses an already-saved credit card to make payment immediate.