Paying for a purchase on the site is a necessary attribute of any good online store. This is not just a rule of good taste, it is a significant increase in turnover. There are a lot of payment methods in Runet — Yandex electronic currencies.Money, Qiwi, WebMoney, RBK Money, as well as bank cards, mobile phone accounts, sms micropayments, etc. How can I give customers the opportunity to pay for purchases in their favorite way?
For our service, we decided not to bother and used the services of one payment aggregator. But as it grew, a large number of comments accumulated. It became clear that the aggregator is a temporary solution, and sooner or later it will have to be abandoned.
Then we tried to approach the task independently and understand in which cases it is worth using payment aggregators, and in which cases it makes sense to refuse their services.
If you've been connecting payment acceptance to a store or your own project, you know that there are two fundamentally different ways to organize payment acceptance for yourself: all through an intermediary and all directly. Here we will look at these two payment system connection schemes and try to compare the advantages and disadvantages that they have. So, you can accept payments:
Both approaches have their pros and cons. First, let's find out what exactly intermediaries offer us when accepting payments. Usually, a large number of advantages are described on the sites of payment aggregators. But, in general, it turns out to highlight 4 main points that are the basis of the proposal of any of them:
However, it should be noted that in many cases, to accept cards, you will still have to enter into an Internet acquiring agreement with the bank.
Summary: using payment aggregators allows you to quickly start accepting payments with minimal connection costs.
There is a well-known saying that you should not put all your eggs in one basket. Therefore, it is somewhat dangerous to let your entire financial flow through one channel. The owner of an online store can estimate what losses the company will suffer if the aggregator server suddenly goes down, despite the slogans. Or, for example, the intermediary will delay the payment of accepted payments — all income from sales of our product is with them!
Summary: working with intermediaries adds an additional node that is not under our control to the system, which means that it does not improve reliability.
Many people have heard that paying with a credit card online is dangerous, that there are many different types of card fraud, and that the risks in this case lie with the store. But there is no understanding of whether the devil is really scary, how it is painted. Let's try to understand what scammers can do to us.
Card payments have two special features. First, the completed payment can be revoked. Secondly, the card itself is not required for the transaction, only its details are needed.
This leads to two of the most common fraud schemes:
Technically, payments from plastic cards are processed in special software and hardware complexes — processing centers. Visa/Mastercard impose very strict security requirements (PCI DSS standard) on these centers. Not all banks are able to accept plastic card payments online. Those that do this are called acquiring banks. They usually have their own processing centers.
There are many methods to combat fraudulent transactions ("fraud") — these are preventive methods, such as confirming card ownership, white and black lists of cards, ip addresses, and post-factum verification. For example, it analyzes the amount of purchases, the frequency of making payments, and where payments were made from. Quick post-factum verification allows you to cancel the payment even before the attacker tries to receive the product. Acquiring banks implement such functionality-it is profitable for them to make their customers feel protected. Thus, the acquiring bank will already fight fraud and reduce possible damage from it. Aggregators make their own additional checks in addition to bank ones.
To understand how real the threat is and what financial losses it can cause, you need to assess the scale of fraud. When trying to determine how many fraudulent operations are performed, what the volume of these operations is, and how well processing centers deal with them, you can't find out anything specific in Runet. Therefore, we had to seek help from foreign sources (it will require registration), who say that in 2010 fraudulent transactions caused damage by 0.9% of the turnover. And there is a clear downward trend in this indicator.
Both banks and aggregators have departments for tracking fraudulent transactions. However, aggregators charge an additional 1-2% of your turnover for this, which, by the way, is obviously more than possible losses. In addition, they still won't fully protect you from chargebacks.
Visa/MasterCard are also working quite intensively to reduce fraudulent transactions. The fruit of their work is 3DSecure technology. Its purpose is to use three-domain authorization. When making a payment, the client must enter an additional password on the website of the bank that issued the card (issuing bank). Its main advantage is that when using these protocols, the responsibility for possible financial losses falls on the issuing bank of the card. For the merchant, this means that even if the payment is found to be fraudulent, the merchant will not lose anything.
Summary: aggregators do not do anything fundamentally new that acquiring banks would not have already done for them, and at the same time they charge additional percentages of turnover for their "services". Firstly, it causes direct losses to the business, and secondly, it is obviously more than the amount of possible losses from fraudulent transactions.
The situation here is also not in favor of aggregators. After all, in the case of an intermediary, when paying, there is at least one additional transition to a page with an incomprehensible interface and design (someone goes further and requires entering e-mail, registering, etc.). All this scares the client a lot, and often gives the payment process a terribly confusing look. By the way, at one conference I heard the opinion that adding an extra click to the interface reduces the number of users who completed the task by several times
An important factor when making a payment is what the page where the customer is asked to enter their payment details looks like (one of the ways to steal cards is through fake payment pages). A careful customer carefully monitors where they enter their card details. And if the payment page doesn't seem reliable enough, they will change their mind about paying (I personally only trust the pages of banks and large foreign stores).
Summary: The payment process using payment aggregators has a large selection of payment systems, but it is very confusing, often inconvenient, and can scare off some customers.
Let's estimate the cost of connecting all payment systems from above. Let's assume that we want to connect all possible payment systems, including bank cards via the acquiring bank. We will want to implement all the interfaces ourselves, test everything, pay for all possible costs for negotiations, courier work, etc.We roughly estimated our costs at about 100 thousand. There may be a lot of controversy about this figure, but in any case, the order remains the same. For the same reasons, you can estimate that connecting to the aggregator will cost several times less.
Let's say we are no longer the smallest company, and we have$ 100 thousand a month passing through the Internet. Then two percent is 60 thousand rubles. This means that the savings in commission will pay for our entire event in two months and start making a profit. And the appearance of high-quality, reliable payment that customers will trust will increase the conversion of visitors to customers and our turnover.
From this, we can conclude that connecting to payment systems directly is economically justified for a good store. I can say one thing for sure: if we had thought about this earlier, we would have connected to everyone without an intermediary a long time ago.
P.S.
The article is largely subjective, based on our experience and our results of analyzing the situation on the payment system market. I am sure that the observations and experience of the habrasoobshchestvo will help clarify the conclusions and make the article more accurate, so I invite everyone to discuss!
For our service, we decided not to bother and used the services of one payment aggregator. But as it grew, a large number of comments accumulated. It became clear that the aggregator is a temporary solution, and sooner or later it will have to be abandoned.
Then we tried to approach the task independently and understand in which cases it is worth using payment aggregators, and in which cases it makes sense to refuse their services.
If you've been connecting payment acceptance to a store or your own project, you know that there are two fundamentally different ways to organize payment acceptance for yourself: all through an intermediary and all directly. Here we will look at these two payment system connection schemes and try to compare the advantages and disadvantages that they have. So, you can accept payments:
- Through an intermediary-a payment aggregator;
- Directly by connecting to the required payment systems.
Both approaches have their pros and cons. First, let's find out what exactly intermediaries offer us when accepting payments. Usually, a large number of advantages are described on the sites of payment aggregators. But, in general, it turns out to highlight 4 main points that are the basis of the proposal of any of them:
- "Minimizing financial and time costs during activation"
This clause means that in order to start accepting all payment systems, you need to conclude only one contract and implement only one software interface on your site. - "Reliability"
This refers to the high uptime of the aggregator's servers and the protection of user data from getting to third parties. - "Protection against fraudulent transactions"
One of the functions of payment aggregators is to protect you from all kinds of scams on the Internet. This mainly applies to operations with bank cards. - "Various payment methods"
After going to the intermediary page, the buyer can choose a payment system from a large list. It is quite possible that the client will find a payment method that is familiar to them.
"Minimizing financial and time costs during activation"
This is an undoubted advantage of any payment aggregator. In fact, you only need to use one protocol, and you will only have to sign a contract with one organization. At this point, you can really save a lot of time and effort. For companies that are just starting to sell on the Internet, the use of payment aggregators looks like a rational step due to this point.However, it should be noted that in many cases, to accept cards, you will still have to enter into an Internet acquiring agreement with the bank.
Summary: using payment aggregators allows you to quickly start accepting payments with minimal connection costs.
"Reliability"
Aggregators usually provide good uptime for their servers and high reliability when working with them. But in any case, the servers of payment aggregators are an additional node when accepting payments, which means that reliability loses out in comparison with direct connection.There is a well-known saying that you should not put all your eggs in one basket. Therefore, it is somewhat dangerous to let your entire financial flow through one channel. The owner of an online store can estimate what losses the company will suffer if the aggregator server suddenly goes down, despite the slogans. Or, for example, the intermediary will delay the payment of accepted payments — all income from sales of our product is with them!
Summary: working with intermediaries adds an additional node that is not under our control to the system, which means that it does not improve reliability.
"Protection against fraudulent transactions"
Card payments have two special features. First, the completed payment can be revoked. Secondly, the card itself is not required for the transaction, only its details are needed.
This leads to two of the most common fraud schemes:
- I received the product / service, then withdrew my payment at the bank. But I already have the goods!
- I stole someone's bank card or its details and started making purchases with it.
Technically, payments from plastic cards are processed in special software and hardware complexes — processing centers. Visa/Mastercard impose very strict security requirements (PCI DSS standard) on these centers. Not all banks are able to accept plastic card payments online. Those that do this are called acquiring banks. They usually have their own processing centers.
There are many methods to combat fraudulent transactions ("fraud") — these are preventive methods, such as confirming card ownership, white and black lists of cards, ip addresses, and post-factum verification. For example, it analyzes the amount of purchases, the frequency of making payments, and where payments were made from. Quick post-factum verification allows you to cancel the payment even before the attacker tries to receive the product. Acquiring banks implement such functionality-it is profitable for them to make their customers feel protected. Thus, the acquiring bank will already fight fraud and reduce possible damage from it. Aggregators make their own additional checks in addition to bank ones.
To understand how real the threat is and what financial losses it can cause, you need to assess the scale of fraud. When trying to determine how many fraudulent operations are performed, what the volume of these operations is, and how well processing centers deal with them, you can't find out anything specific in Runet. Therefore, we had to seek help from foreign sources (it will require registration), who say that in 2010 fraudulent transactions caused damage by 0.9% of the turnover. And there is a clear downward trend in this indicator.
Both banks and aggregators have departments for tracking fraudulent transactions. However, aggregators charge an additional 1-2% of your turnover for this, which, by the way, is obviously more than possible losses. In addition, they still won't fully protect you from chargebacks.
Visa/MasterCard are also working quite intensively to reduce fraudulent transactions. The fruit of their work is 3DSecure technology. Its purpose is to use three-domain authorization. When making a payment, the client must enter an additional password on the website of the bank that issued the card (issuing bank). Its main advantage is that when using these protocols, the responsibility for possible financial losses falls on the issuing bank of the card. For the merchant, this means that even if the payment is found to be fraudulent, the merchant will not lose anything.
Summary: aggregators do not do anything fundamentally new that acquiring banks would not have already done for them, and at the same time they charge additional percentages of turnover for their "services". Firstly, it causes direct losses to the business, and secondly, it is obviously more than the amount of possible losses from fraudulent transactions.
"Various payment methods"
The number of payment methods that payment aggregators offer is impressive. I bet you haven't even heard of 90% of them. But do not forget about the comfort of users. It should be convenient not only to choose from dozens of currencies, but also the payment process itself.The situation here is also not in favor of aggregators. After all, in the case of an intermediary, when paying, there is at least one additional transition to a page with an incomprehensible interface and design (someone goes further and requires entering e-mail, registering, etc.). All this scares the client a lot, and often gives the payment process a terribly confusing look. By the way, at one conference I heard the opinion that adding an extra click to the interface reduces the number of users who completed the task by several times
An important factor when making a payment is what the page where the customer is asked to enter their payment details looks like (one of the ways to steal cards is through fake payment pages). A careful customer carefully monitors where they enter their card details. And if the payment page doesn't seem reliable enough, they will change their mind about paying (I personally only trust the pages of banks and large foreign stores).
Summary: The payment process using payment aggregators has a large selection of payment systems, but it is very confusing, often inconvenient, and can scare off some customers.
Total
Small or start-up stores may well decide for themselves that unification and low costs when connecting outweigh all the disadvantages of aggregators. But an online store with good sales is guaranteed to lose tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of rubles per month on the aggregator's additional commission. And if you also remember that paying a client is not always convenient, then the question" why not connect directly without an aggregator " becomes relevant. So at what speed exactly should you abandon the aggregator and connect directly to payment systems?Let's estimate the cost of connecting all payment systems from above. Let's assume that we want to connect all possible payment systems, including bank cards via the acquiring bank. We will want to implement all the interfaces ourselves, test everything, pay for all possible costs for negotiations, courier work, etc.We roughly estimated our costs at about 100 thousand. There may be a lot of controversy about this figure, but in any case, the order remains the same. For the same reasons, you can estimate that connecting to the aggregator will cost several times less.
Let's say we are no longer the smallest company, and we have$ 100 thousand a month passing through the Internet. Then two percent is 60 thousand rubles. This means that the savings in commission will pay for our entire event in two months and start making a profit. And the appearance of high-quality, reliable payment that customers will trust will increase the conversion of visitors to customers and our turnover.
From this, we can conclude that connecting to payment systems directly is economically justified for a good store. I can say one thing for sure: if we had thought about this earlier, we would have connected to everyone without an intermediary a long time ago.
P.S.
The article is largely subjective, based on our experience and our results of analyzing the situation on the payment system market. I am sure that the observations and experience of the habrasoobshchestvo will help clarify the conclusions and make the article more accurate, so I invite everyone to discuss!
