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How to trust payment providers?

One of the glories of Magento is simply that it is so popular: This has the effect that every payment provider out there is eager to create a Magento extension, leaving you with a wide range of choices: But which payment provider is good? Is it only a financial issue or is trust also something to consider?

What's the risk?

There are hundreds of payment providers. To name a few: PayPal, Google Checkout, MultiSafePay, Ogone, Buckaroo, 2Checkout, LinkPoint, Authorize.net. The list goes on. At the time of writing there are 477 payment methods listed on the MagentoConnect site.

When you choose for a payment provider, you might draw a comparison by looking at their charges. But besides the costs, you will also need to calculate the risk: How easy do they grant a refund and is this in-sync with your own policy? What about uptime? If their servers are down, you won't receive any payments. There are plenty of risks that you take when using a payment provider.

Privacy & trust

Another thing to consider is that some payment providers automatically create accounts for the customers that use them: A one-time customer in your shop therefor still ends up with an account of your payment provider. You really need to find out whether your customers find this problematic and whether the payment provider is clear enough in its policy.

And if they do store customer information, are you sure enough that they deal with those sensitive data in a trustable data? If their servers get hacked, it will most likely do your shop no good either.

Big mouth

A payment provider might have a big mouth (or a beautiful website or both), but the noise they may make, does not neccessarily guarantee good quality. We have dealt with various payment providers in various sorts, and we can tell you that you may be stumbed if you find out how unprofessional some are run. 

Some payment providers are run from a garage, others have their developers in South East Asia and are impossible to communicate with. Yet others already look stupid when you ask them a question about a certain creditcard validation. For sure, it's a complex business which deals with a lot of e-commerce activities - but that's exactly the business.

Beware of payment providers

Unfortunately, we will not give you any advise or compare payment providers for you: Everybody has their own likings and this was still ment to be an objective blog. But a general advise still exists: Beware of payment providers!