Add Payment Options in WooCommerce: Intro to Payment Gateways

The WooCommerce eCommerce plugin for WordPress is an excellent choice for anyone who wants to build an online store with minimal effort and expense. The plugin makes setting up and managing an online store with WordPress much less daunting than you might imagine, and includes many great features to make your life easier.

One of those features included in the core version of the plugin is the ability to accept payments from your customers via PayPal, as well as a few other core payment options. However, while PayPal is one of the leading payment gateways in operation today, it isn’t always everyone’s first choice when it comes to sending or accepting payments online. 

Thankfully, WooCommerce also supports many other payment gateways, which means your eCommerce store can make use of the other options already out there. Also, while WooCommerce does support PayPal standard payments out of the box, this does involve sending the customer to the PayPal website to enter their payment details. 

However, your WooCommerce store can be enhanced to make use of the advanced features offered by PayPal in order to allow you to better serve your customers with a more integrated checkout process, keeping them onsite as they complete the transaction.

So whether you want to avoid using PayPal altogether, gain access to more advanced payment options from this popular payment processor, or you simply want to give your customers more options for paying for your goods or services, this article will help you weigh up the available options and give you an overview of what is involved in order to add them to your site.

Options for Integrating Payment Gateways in WooCommerce

As well as the standard PayPal integration, which as previously mentioned takes the user to the PayPal website to enter their payment details, there are other options for taking payments on your WordPress WooCommerce powered online store. 

These additional options can be added to your eCommerce store by installing the corresponding extension on your site, much in the same way you would install a regular WordPress plugin. However, in order to use the more advanced features of these payment gateway addons, especially those that enable a more seamless integration with your store, you will need to have an SSL certificate installed for your store in order to be PCI compliant. 

With many payment gateway extensions to choose from, here are a few highlights to help you make a decision on which one might be suitable for your site, and how you can go about setting them up:

PayPal Advanced

The PayPal Advanced extension adds a seamless integration with this payment gateway to your website, allowing your customers to enter their payment details right on your site, without leaving our store. 

This creates a much more professional impression for your online store as opposed to sending them offsite to enter their details. Customers don’t need a PayPal account to make a payment via this option.

You will need a PayPal Advanced Payments account and an SSL certificate to make the most of the features of this extension, but it will simplify PCI compliance, and allow your visitors to stay on site during the check out. 

Setting up the extension is pretty straightforward and can be done using the familiar WordPress and WooCommerce user interface.

This isn’t the only PayPal extension for WooCommerce and you can compare the features of the different options here.

Amazon Simple Pay

Amazon Simple Pay allows customers at your store to check out and make their payment using their Amazon account. The idea is that you can gain trust by associating yourself with the number one online retailer, while also giving your customers more options for paying for their goods.

This extension also allows customer to make a payment using their credit card to ensure you get the best of both worlds when it comes the options you can offer your customers. 

Again, this isn’t the only Amazon payment gateway extension for WooCommerce and you can compare the different options here.

Authorize.net CIM

The Authorize.net CIM payment gateway extension for WooCommerce allows you to easily and securely accept credit cards at your online store. 

Customers can even save their credit card and bank account details as part of their customer accounts on your store, making it very convenient for them to make repeat purchases. As the checkout process all takes place on your site, there is no disruption of the checkout flow while the payment details are entered and the goods are paid for.

For PCI compliance, you will need an SSL certificate to ensure the payment details that are entered are securely store on your site. 

Conclusion 

As you can see, there are many options for expanding the payment processing abilities of a WooCommerce powered eCommerce store. While the standard PayPal features might be enough for some users, having the ability to keep users on your store for the entire checkout process, as well as giving them the ability to save their payment details for later use can be beneficial to both you the store owner and the customer. 

However, the more integrated the payment process is for your site, the more responsibility will be on your shoulders to ensure the transaction is secure. If you need any help with this please get in touch to discuss the various options for handling payments on your site and ensuring you remain PCI compliant.