You’ve decided to start an online business.
No matter if you sell material items or digital content, or something even more ephemeral. Payments made by your customers should be easy for them – and easily make their way to you. That’s when a merchant portal steps into the rescue. Embedding one into your website makes it extremely easy to process payments you receive and analyze your activity.
All Systems Go!
While there are lots of payment systems, customers stick to what they find best. Some prefer the good old VISA and MasterCard, others are all about PayPal, Skrill, or TransferWIse, and some trust GooglePay and ApplePay. A customer should be able to pay the way they prefer; a merchant needs to find out how to receive these payments most comfortably. That’s why a payment gateway is an integral part of a merchant portal.
It’s even more than that: the portal lets you work manually with certain customers. This eases refunds, disputes, check subscriptions, and so on.
No Borders
Merchant portals are extremely important for international businesses. If you sell your products worldwide (or even in several countries), banking issues pop up unexpectedly. Currency exchange rates may eat more of your income than you might expect. Transactions can take more time when made directly. In addition, there can be issues with tax laws, sometimes even causing double taxation. These and other reasons can prevent payments from succeeding.
The merchant portal has special tools that let the merchant apply certain rules for payments from certain countries, currencies, applications, and card brands and types. Applied correctly, they can minimize refusals and maximize the number of successful transactions.
While lots of currencies can be accepted, the choice of base currencies is smaller. Still, choosing between USD, EUR and GBP should be enough for most merchants. The portal supports separate accounts for each currency, so you can have multiple ones to avoid unnecessary exchange fees.
Analyze This
Along with a payment gateway, the merchant portal provides analytics on payments. This data can be precious for an analyst, as it lets the merchant compare various periods’ stats and latest changes and consider all the impacts the business had.
On the portal, you can access stats like the number of sales within a certain time, the payout volume, the number of all the transactions and (separately) successful transactions, and the current balance formed by successful transactions in each currency. This makes the merchant portal a powerful tool for reflecting your business views and comparing them to reality. If you feel it’s time for upgrades and improvements, the portal can tell you many useful things.
Put Our Differences Behind Us
If you have ever played the famous Portal, you may remember this quote. A merchant portal in real life, though, does it better, putting all the differences behind so they don’t stand in the way of your success. If you like this article, share it on your Facebook or Twitter. And if you have already been enjoying the portal, share your experience here.
