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If you’re selling products online through your eCommerce store, then you’re going to need a lot more than just a great website – you’re also going to need a safe way to accept and process payments online. The good news? There are plenty of plugins out there that will help you to take payments on WooCommerce, Magneto, and Shopify sites. Unfortunately, if you choose the wrong one, then you could risk scaring off your customers and losing potential sales.

With the right payment gateway, you’ll protect both you and your customers with your day-to-day transactions, so you can focus on simply making money. However, you’ll need to make sure that the gateway you choose is secure, easy to integrate with your chosen CMS, and not too expensive for your business.

The Best Way to Take Payments on WooCommerce: PayPal

If you’re using WooCommerce as your CMS, then you should have access to pretty much any of the major payment gateways available online. This means that you have plenty of options to choose from when deciding how to support your customers. The best way to make the right decision is to evaluate your target audience and find out which kind of payment systems they feel most comfortable with.

For most online consumers today, the most obvious choice will be PayPal. PayPal is the most popular online payment gateway by a mile for most stores, and it has more than 200 million customers today. Not only is PayPal incredibly well respected, but it’s also:

Designed for easy use through the WooCommerce plugin
Perfect for multi-country stores because it supports up to 20 currencies
Available with PayPal pro if you want to process credit card payments and user balance payments.

With PayPal Pro on WooCommerce, it’s also possible to customise the checkout process for your store, so you can make it as great as possible for your customers. Other options for WooCommerce users include:

Stripe
2Checkout
Auorize.net
Amazon Pay

The Best Way to Take Payments on Shopify: Stripe

Stripe is one of the biggest competitors to PayPal when it comes to processing payments form credit and debit cards online. On the consumer side of things, Stripe works very similarly to PayPal, so your customers shouldn’t have any trouble using it. From an eCommerce store owner’s perspective on Shopify, Stripe offers a few additional advantages on top of PayPal. For instance:

You can use Stripe to take payments for digital services
Strip supports subscriptions and metred billing
Stripe provides a better customer service solution than PayPal for Business users

The most important thing to consider is that Stripe is only available in a limited number of countries. You’ll need to check that the countries that your eCommerce store serves are supported by Stripe before you start setting up your payment portal. If Stripe doesn’t work for you, then there are plenty of other third-party gateways available, including:

Paypal
Authorize.net
2Checkout
Amazon Payments
First Data

Shopify even has its own payment gateway that allows people to directly accept payments with Shopify. The system is powered by Stripe, so you can expect a very similar experience if you want to avoid taking the gateway route.

The Best Way to Take Payments on Magneto: Sage Pay

Finally, Sage Pay is the leading independent payment service provider for Europe. There’s a good chance that you’ve already processed a payment through Sage Pay in the past if you’ve ever purchased something online. As one of the most trusted brands available for processing credit and debit payments online, Sage Pay is a fantastic option for people who want to manage their transactions on a Magneto-based store.

Each year, Sage Pay is responsible for processing more than 4 billion payments online, and through card machines for over 50,000 businesses around Europe. One of the most attractive features of Sage Pay is its excellent commitment to security. Every transaction supported by Sage Pay is encrypted to the highest standards held around the globe. Additionally, the payment systems are regularly checked and audited so you can rest assured that they’re secure.

If you’re not interested in using Sage Pay, or you’re planning on selling products and services to customers outside of Europe, then there are plenty of other options available for Magneto users, including: