A Beginner's Guide to WooCommerce Payments

It's not complete without an option to conduct payments. It's a vital aspect, so you'll also want to consider the payment processor you choose to choose to use. There are a number of perennial contenders to consider, but WooCommerce Payments is well worth the time particularly if you are using the plugin.

The plugin will integrate WooCommerce Payments with your site to the best way possible yet still provide you with the features you require for taking payments. Although it's easy to set up and use, nothing is exactly as you think -- and we'll discuss this later in the section below.

The rest of the post, we're going to look at WooCommerce Payments, and how to use it. It will also be compared to the other gateways that are popular. Let's first examine the specifications an ideal gateway will meet.

What is the best Ecommerce Payment Gateway?

When you shop online, the majority of the attention will go towards the customer-business connection. This is all well and well, however there's a second important aspect of the process that requires your focus: the payment choice of the payment gateway.

This is software that connects the frontend button on your website to make an order, and (ultimately) the bank account you have. If you arrive at the stage of your payment process in which you have to enter your billing information, this is the payments gateway that is in operation.

Because the gateway will handle the vital process of processing payment transactions, it needs to have a few key elements in place:

• Accessibility: There are two points to this. You'll want to ensure that the gateway can be found not just in the country of operations, but also the countries of the target audience. If you operate a global business, the gateway will require to be throughout the world.
• Transparency-friendly transactions: If a gateway ticks most of the boxes and charges a small amount for transactions, it's going to hit the user severely. You'll want the most cost-effective set of charges you can muster by contacting your service provider.
• Intuitive and simple interface It goes without saying that having a User Interface (UI) which has an organized layout can be a blessing to any application. In the case of a gateway, it will be the difference between an empty cart and a full transaction.
• Integration with your ecommerce solution: As a WooCommerce user, the payment gateway you pick must work with your. Without it, you won't be able process transactions at all.

We'll be discussing several payment options that tick all of these boxes We'll pick one to highlight in the rest of this post. We'll take a look at it later.

Introducing WooCommerce Payments

If you use WooCommerce as an e-commerce platform and you take advantage of WooCommerce's hosting, it makes sense to incorporate WooCommerce's Payments to your website. It's one of the "official" payment gateway for the site it comes with numerous impressive options:

• It uses a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model to process transactions (more about this in the near future).
• The extension offers full integration with WooCommerce.
• You'll track everything about your payment transactions on the WordPress dashboard.
• WooCommerce Payments offers multi-currency support with 135 different options at your disposal.

Like you would expect, WooCommerce Payments, as you would expect is an Automattic product. This means you get the highest level of integration with WooCommerce as well as WordPress that is enticing for a store on those platforms.

Actually, it's the only one of the payment platforms with this type of integration. However, this doesn't stop at WooCommerce. The extension can be integrated with other extensions to do things you would not normally be able. Take, for instance, WooCommerce Subscriptions:

If you use this and WooCommerce Payments, you'll be able to manage these subscriptions inside WordPress in a way no other solution can.

For technical needs for technical requirements, you'll require a WordPress installation and server setup for the task, which usually is at a minimum PHP 7.0, WordPress 5.7 or WooCommerce 4.8.

You'll also require to have a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to access the gateway in "live mode," and a business based in one of 18 countries supported. A WordPress.com account is also required in addition to the Jetpack plugin to help carry out transactions and linking services.

For transaction fees, these depend on your country, although you'll notice that they're identical to another popular payment gateway within Stripe. This is because WooCommerce Payments is an "white-label" variant of Stripe. We'll talk more about this in a bit later.

Why Use WooCommerce Payments Over Other Gateways?

There are a myriad of different payment options that are available to WooCommerce users, there needs to be something special regarding WooCommerce Payments to attract users.

There are some motives we could consider for the reasons why you should go to go with this option:

1. You get the greatest level of integration with WordPress and WooCommerce. It's almost perfect and no other gateway will have the ability to compete with the level of integration.
2. Since the way WooCommerce works, you can also handle every aspect of your transactions from the WordPress Dashboard, without the necessity of logging into an app from a third party.
3. Since the gateway is constructed on the foundation of Stripe the gateway is strong sturdy, solid, and popular.
4. Additionally, how you can connect your Stripe gateway to Third-party solutions should be identical with WooCommerce Payments.

In the end, the principal reason why you should use WooCommerce Payments is for the extremely tight integration with Automattic. Even so, it's worth exploring how WooCommerce Payments compares against the alternatives. We'll take a look some of them in the next part.

Four other payment gateways are also popular for WooCommerce

There are myriad payment gateways that you can choose from, we've got four that we will contrast against WooCommerce Payments.

However, the first might be familiar, for a important reason, which we'll discuss. We'll start by introducing the Stripe gateway as it is central to the work WooCommerce Payments does.

1. Stripe

The first is Stripe. This will be a familiar platform to the majority of people because of its popularity, features as well as its low rate of transaction.

WooCommerce Payments gets its genealogy to Stripe since it's a white-label variant that is a gateway. This means that the Stripe logo is taken away and replaced with the one of WooCommerce. From there, Automattic makes further changes to incorporate it into WordPress as well as WooCommerce.

That means that even though Stripe is a part of WooCommerce Payments, and WooCommerce Payments share the same design and structure, the two options can be different. In fact, Stripe is already in WooCommerce as the standard payment gateway. As such, it offers a few differences:

• You can use Stripe in more countries as it's a more mature option.
• There will not be as much integration between WordPress and your online store. However, this is still acceptable, given that it's a default option in WooCommerce.

We'd suggest that the first point here is going to determine the reasons why people choose to use Stripe. When it comes to Stripe or WooCommerce payments it is a matter of access to countries in the world and also integration with WordPress. Whichever you favor more will help inform your decision.

2. PayPal

For those who are old enough, PayPal was an absolute revelation at the time it was launched. It was the number one option to manage transactions and transfer money online for a long time. Even though there's much more competition these days but it still has the ability to shake it's hands on the biggest options available.

It's a mature and functional gateway for payments that comes with many interesting options:

• It's got the infrastructure and reliability you'd expect from top-of-the-line gateway.
• There's lots of flexibility within the processing capabilities for payments. As an example, you can make use of Paypal's "Pay In 3" option to divide a huge payments into three separate installments.
• If you'll require a third-party dashboard to manage your transactions, the dashboard is simple as well as feature-rich and attractive.

Its versatility is one reason PayPal will be a winner over WooCommerce Payments. Pay in 3 is a great option for end users The checkout procedure is familiar and easy to use.

What's more, you can create recurring payment and subscriptions with no need of an extension. In fact, a lot of websites are set up to deal with PayPal. Most users will have PayPal accounts set up, ready to go.

The PayPal fee for transactions and merchants are notorious for their ambiguity at times. There's a whole microsite dedicated to describing and listing them. This is part of the reasons for switching to PayPal to PayPal in the first place.

In addition to this to this, the support for customers is lackluster at points -in particular, when it comes to disputes. Although this shouldn't deter you from using PayPal however, it ought to make you think whether it's worth the effort.

3. Square

WordPress customers will recognize that Square nearly as a rival that is a bit like they own the Weebly site builders solution. Of course, Square is a fantastic payment gateway on its own.

There are several motives why people will choose to Square instead of other options:

• In the beginning, it only takes just a few minutes to setup the system, and its day-to-day useability is excellent.
• The Square Checking service lets you get your cash fast. This is essential for your comfort and security.
• The transaction costs are simple and are low (we'll discuss this later).

Combined, this makes Square one of the most popular payment processing platforms accessible. But, we'd advise that Square is ideal to use for point of sale (PoS) transactions. Lots of businesses will use Square's software and hardware for their payment processing We'd like to accept this.

It's still a good payment service that is also able to integration with WooCommerce however, to a lesser degree as WooCommerce Payments.

For transaction fees It's a breeze. If you take an US user into account, you'll pay 2.9 per cent in addition to a $0.30 fee for each purchase. You can pay different rates based on how you use Square however, in general, you'll know exactly what the cost will be for each transaction.

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4. Authorize.net

Even though Visa runs Authorize.net, it's the exception when it comes to payment gateways. It's also not lacking with regards to features or capabilities.

Actually, there are lots of positives in the use of Authorize.net as your payment gateway:

• It's flexible with regard to where you can take payments. In the case of WooCommerce stores, this's not important, but this means Authorize.net can grow with your requirements.
• It is possible to offer a variety of payment types, not just Visa. You can, for instance, accept all credit cards in addition to Apple Pay, Visa Pay, and more. Also, PayPal is an option.
• The security tools you receive safeguard you as well as your customers. The latest fraud prevention technology is integrated into the gateway and by extension, your payment process.

The only sticking point that you have to work around with Authorize.net is the cost. The fees for transactions are nominal at 2.9% plus the $0.30 handling cost and you'll need to pay a fee of $25 per month cost to use Authorize.net.

If you already have a bank account with a merchant, there is still a fee of $25 per month, but transactions are charged $0.10 per every transaction. It could be advantageous if you have the infrastructure. Although, despite its positives it is possible that you would be better off with another payment processor that provides higher quality for less expense.

How do you install WooCommerce payments?

In general, the procedure for installing the plugin of WooCommerce Payments functions the same as any different WordPress plug-in. However, the extension asks for a few more steps before proceeding:

• You'll require an account on WordPress.com login to be able to access Automattic's unique security.
• It is necessary to confirm the details of your company and financial information before you can continue using the extension.
• For live use Your site may need an SSL certificate that's active.

As a result of the requirement to WordPress.com (and by extension, Jetpack) it isn't possible to use WooCommerce payments on a local server. This is a pain, and could be a pain issue for many users -- unless you're a WordPress developers who can edit files to bypass the live mode settings for a short period of time.

If you're looking to make use of WooCommerce Payments then you must understand the fundamental notion. But, the procedure for all of them is simple. Connecting to WordPress.com requires a single click through an approve button:

...then you can enter a phone number and email address:

The Stripe section of the process will require you to give some personal details about your business as well as an active bank account to your company:

After you've finished this process and are ready to go to the depths of WooCommerce's Payments interface.

How to use WooCommerce payments

While WooCommerce Payments is a straightforward option to set up it, there's quite a bit going on within its various screen. Over the next few sections, we'll talk about certain screens, and the way you should set up and use the extension.

Account Overview

The first screen that you'll encounter in your first session with WooCommerce Payments will be an overview screen: Overview screen:

The panel on the left shows your overall balance, however it offers more information. For example, you can see the available balance, that is always useful however, you can also see the balance that is pending.

This will offer value when you've got a lot of transactions in your store. However, there are certain transactions that aren't processed at the exact in the same time, but it's nice you get to distinguish between balances.

There are also figures for the last and subsequent deposits. This is going to be relevant in conjunction with the settings for your deposit schedule over these figures. There's an "at-a-glance" report of your deposit schedule -The default will be an automatic deposit into your bank account each daily.

Below, you will find your account details Information:

It's an overview of whether you've set up payments -- which you should have -- and the regularity of deposits. It's a great opportunity to review additional options for the settings of your WooCommerce Payments account. we'll do that next.

Settings

It's the WooCommerce Payments Settings link will take the user into WooCommerce Settings. Settings > Payments. It's here that you'll see several sections as well as checkboxes that will help you set up the extension:

There are four sections here:

• general: You can enable the extension here, and additionally, you can enable a limited testing mode that is only for use locally.
• Payments accepted on check-out: This section offers the option of a checkbox which lets you allow credit and debit cards.
• Express payment options: It is also possible to allow Apple Pay and Google Pay in addition to deciding the pages that users are able to access them.
• Deposits and transactions This setting lets you provide a seamless payment and transaction experience among other options.

Within this last section, you can let a user pay with a saved instance of a card to enable quicker checkout. Also, you can create a credit card, and store it for later. This is more of a user benefit, because you can pay with more simple procedure.

The last one is the one that's called Statement of bank accounts for customers requires more attention prior to moving on.

Bank Statement Descriptors

When you make a purchase and your bank statement is issued, it will show a clear and distinct name for the business which you conduct business with. This can be set in WooCommerce Payments also by making use of the field: Customer bank statement field:

There are some couple of requirements that you must be aware of when you choose this title:

• You should use no fewer than five and not greater than Latin characters.
• It should contain at minimum one letter as well as zero unique characters.
• The descriptor must represent your company's name in a manner that is clear for the client.

In all cases it is recommended to use your business name or the address of your website. If you have to utilize a different descriptor you must make it clear for the customer when they check out.

Transaction Types

The Payrolls section of the The Transactions screen will display the details of your recent transactions. There are some details here to note, but we want to pay some particular attention to different kinds of transactions you'll come across.

Certain of these choices could cause confusion at first, as it's easy to misunderstand the meaning behind them. Let's look at what each one stands for:

• Deposit: This means a transfer of the balance in your WooCommerce account into your bank account that you designed. It's a withdrawal as far as you're concerned. You'll be able to view all your deposit details on the Payments > Deposits page.
• Cost: When a customer makes a purchase, they receive a charge which is a recording of their entire purchase.
• Refund: This is when you have had to return an amount that was charged to the card used by the customer.
• Dispute When a buyer wants to query a charge from you, that's known as"a dispute" and registered as a certain kind of transaction.
• Reversal of Dispute: Consider this a "Not Guilty" appeal on behalf of you. It's an acknowledgement that you had the right to do so and the customer lodged an untrue dispute claim.

The need to talk about dispute resolution because we're likely to come across disputes on a regular (although not common) intervals. There are current disputes through the Payouts > disputes screen.

It is generally an intermediary between your client and yourself. The screen inside WooCommerce Payments allows you to see the reason for the disagreement, and then respond to the issue if needed. You'll have two choice:

• Take the matter to court This results in a refund to the customer and also settles the issue.
• Contest the decision: Stripe will require you to provide evidence for your position. After that you'll have the ability to work to resolve the dispute in a further manner.

The hope is that you'll make use of the Disputes screen very seldom or even at all. But, if you need to venture into the screen, it's easy to follow and doesn't need the majority of your time.

Summary

If an ecommerce site isn't equipped with a payment option It's like having an "lookbook" of items. This is why you'll need your WooCommerce website to feature a secure checkout system that's easy to use and navigate. Automattic will be there for you in the form of the WooCommerce Payments extension.

It is an add-on for WordPress as well as WooCommerce The extension is an original-party product. This implies that it provides compatibility with and integration with the top e-commerce software available. In addition, the functionality is powered by Stripe's amazing gateway, which means that both you and your users will be free from any issues.

Are you convinced that WooCommerce Payments can hold its own compared to the competition? Let us know your opinions in the comment section below!

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