What is the best payment gateway for International use?
Thinking about expanding your online business internationally? Select the right payment gateway provider that will offer you the support you need.
Trade in the era of steadily expanding Internet access transformed into something well beyond a Saturday trip to the mall. Buying products from all over the world are fast, easy, and not nearly limited enough by shipping and additional costs to make it impractical. And that's just taking into consideration physical products. If the product is digital in nature, e-commerce seems to be a perfect fit.
When you are selling music, movies, video games or even video game-related content like skins or subscriptions, enabling online payment is a very sensible approach, widely broadening your potential customer base.
One of the things that must be considered as you set up an online shop is how your customers are going to pay for the goods. This is where payment gateways enter the stage.
Payment gateway: what is it?
To make matters clear for those who don't know, or refresh for those who do, let us briefly summarize what a payment gateway actually is:
At its most basic, a payment gateway is a merchant service which oversees transactions between buyers and sellers. More accurately, it enables and authorizes a money transfer between the buyer's issuing bank and the seller's acquiring bank.
Factors to consider
In the case of international payment gateways an important factor is the integration of currencies and different payment forms available, according to local preferences. When your projected customer sees a familiar logo on the checkout page it strengthens the buyer-seller trust.
Integrating a payment gateway with a broad selection customized for each country is the best way of having the most popular and familiar payment methods available for your customers. In the same vein, displaying product prices and allowing to pay in local currencies prevents customer confusion and uncertainty during checkout.
That being said, let us take a look at some of the online payment gateways dedicated to or experienced in supporting sellers of digital goods.
PayPal
No list of online payment solutions is complete without arguably the best-known payment system, co-founded by Elon Musk and launched to the general public in the early 2000s. For over a decade PayPal has been permeating online stores. To this day by their own admission, PayPal is available in over 200 countries and offers payment in 26 currencies. In addition to widespread availability, PayPal is trusted by customers for its safety, speed, and general convenience. Integrating it into your store is a safe bet, and even massive e-commerce titans like Valve or Origin allow PayPal payments.
Xsolla
Xsolla is a service which caters strictly to video game sellers, including developer-ran stores. Depending on your chosen plan, it can provide payment processing and analytics, fraud prevention, even billing services and publishing tools, if required. Xsolla can handle over 700 payment methods and 89 currencies, all available for developers to implement into their store.
Xsolla has little competition as a video game industry-focused payment gateway, and having been established in 2006 it has had a decade's worth of head start over competitors for this niche.
G2A PAY
A relative newcomer on the e-commerce payment gateway market, G2A PAY was launched in early 2015. With just over a year and a half under its belt, it managed to expand into over 170 countries, enable 80+ currencies and got implemented by more than 200 online stores. In addition to over 200 payment methods available, including area-specific options, G2A PAY seamlessly integrates G2A Wallet, another of the company's payment systems.
Honorable mentions
2Checkout - 15 years of activity speak for themselves in regards of 2Checkout's value. Impressive number of serviced businesses, solid security, and more make 2Checkout worth checking out.
Authorize.net - a payment gateway with twenty years of experience and over 400.000 merchant customers. It certainly deserves mention as a true veteran of payment services.
Stripe - it is among the more popular PayPal alternatives, Stripe is present in over 100 countries, and provides merchant services to 100.000+ businesses around the world.
Closing statements
There certainly is a wealth of options available to stores interested in e-commerce, and while some are better than others, this is largely a matter of matching the offer with the requirements. Every of the discussed payment system providers has a website detailing and explaining how it works and what features are the main draw.
For more tips & tricks on how to grow your eCommerce business, download the G2 PAY eBooks here:
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