How Payment Gateway integration can delay the launch
Hello, today’s blog post is based on the development experience which happed with a friend, but before we jump into it let us hear it from you... How many of you know about the payment gateways and integration of payment gateway. Yeah... It’s simple the visitor buy products online, pay and the same come to your business account its simple.
Indeed simple it is, but not always.
Payment Gateways are usually selected based on geography, and are more prominent locally and with few global players which are become common now a days, some of them are:-
PayPal
CC Avenue
First Data
Ecommerce Exchange
Pay U
Google Wallet
Amazon Payment
Authorize.net
Wepay
ACH Payments and more
If you have not heard of Payment Gateways earlier, by now you must be a little more comfortable with the subject, as we have looked upon the role of payment gateways and their types.
Today’s story revolves around the payment gateway and its integration, which is to be done for a Singapore based Food & Beverages Company, which intends to sell its products online.
Scope for development was set; things were in place, which also includes the integration of payment gateway which was obvious for any E-commerce site.
The Design and Development work was over and before going live the client requested to test and buy couple of products online which was clear, and this is when he faced challenges, but before that let us understands the process and scenario of E-commerce websites.
The Typical E-commerce scenario usually functions as:-
Visitor Selects a certain product, adds it to cart, and specifies the qty.
On placing order customer is asked for payment via the payment gateway.
As the payment is done he is again redirected to the E-commerce website with a message – “Thanks for buying abcd payment is successful.”
At the same time internal processes work and which are:-
Email from Ecommerce Portal to the customer email id
Internal Email to Admin of Ecommerce Portal
Deduction in Inventory levels of the Ecommerce Portal
Email to Admin in case the inventory goes below a threshold limit
Email from Payment Gateway to the customer
This looks simple and simply code and scripting needs to be set to get it all working, but at times this become the real pain when these processes doesn’t fall in line with each other and create unnecessary delay in the launch of an E-commerce website.
Coming back to the problem, as he tested his ready to launch portal and his payment gateways stopped working when it was integrated to the site.
This looked like a small concern and the developer insisted that we can get it fixed, by understanding the details of the payment gate way, which was later fixed.
Next problem faced was that of internal communication, which are as below:-
Mails from website to customer on purchase
Mail to admin on successful transaction
This problems looks like more to do with server and thus the developers requested to get scripting from the hosting provider, which again lead to delay in launch as the process was not working.
As the script was integrated the site started to function well, it already delayed the launch by 5 days or let’s say a week, but we must understand how this can be avoided or tackle proactively.
Our suggestions:-
Client and technical team must jointly choose the payment gateway and target market must be considered before finalizing a payment gateway.
Technical team must understand details from the beginning of the development and should not leave it for the end, so that they have the related code and information as they implement and without any delay.
Server Hosting and Internal server errors are the most neglected points, but with the changing times and importance of online marketing technical teams must understand the server and hosting pattern beforehand so that simultaneous communication can be done with the hosting company to get access to scripts and open any ports as required.
Last but not the least, Development companies must test internally before, handing over the website to clients for testing, this helps them to sort out the silly error and builds trust of client.
Hope you liked the blog.
Thanks
Team sankalp
