Payment gateway integration is an essential for online merchants regardless of their size. When a merchant transform their business from legacy to digital, selection of payment gateway is a critical decision to take in. It is due to various reasons.

Selection of payment gateway

Selection of payment gateway for a merchant mostly depends on below factors :

• Country’s monetary regulations. e.g. Paypal is not right choice for a Sri Lankan business.
• Time to market. Some of the payment gateways still following traditional onboarding process which is taking very long time to onboard a merchant. e.g. iPayOS is providing fully online based onboarding portal where a merchant can start their integrated testing within a Day.
• Settlements capability is limited to particular Bank accounts. e.g. Sampath IPG doesn’t allow any other bank accounts. Payment aggregators such as iPayOS, Cargills, PayHere, Seylan support accepting any settlement bank accounts.
• Technology compatibility. Most of the IPGs provides SDKs and plugins to support any of technology. e.g. Woocommerce plugin, iOS SDK, etc..
• Setup Fee and transaction commission. Payment aggregators such as iPayOS, Cargills, PayHere, Seylan are cost effective compared to others.
• Technical Support. This is critical factor to consider in long term perspective. Some of the IPG support queries takes days or months to get responses.

Somehow merchants go through above tough selection process and choose a right payment gateway for their business.

Payment gateway vendor lock-in

70% of the merchants become un happy customers for their selected payment gateway provider due poor customer support, settlement delays, hidden charges, technical bugs, etc. But they have no choice to move to another provider because of the complexity in migration. 

• Technical complexity
• Cost for migration
• Data migration

Large businesses any overcome from this lock by putting additional investment. But for small or medium businesses, this is very difficult.

Tips for avoiding vendor lock-in

• Instead of going directly with Payment gateways go through Payment aggregators which supports or integrated with multiple payment gateways. e.g. iPayOS is integrated with paycorp and mastercard payment gateways.

• Use aggregated payment payment gateway plugins to integrate where you can configure multiple payment gateways and active any of them anytime.

e.g. iPayOS provide web portal to configure multiple payment gateway from different providers.

Also it allows to configure traffic routing logics where you can add, change or remove any payment gateway anytime within a minute.

For more info you can try it for free https://portal.ipayos.com