Payment Gateway Popularity Contest
Since we provide an online invoicing tool that integrates with a number of payment gateways to help you collect credit card payments online, we often get calls asking for a recommended gateway to use. Our answer is always dependent on the needs of the caller. Our questions are usually:
- Do you process a large number of transactions per month?
- Do you want to accept eChecks or ACH payments?
- Are you based in the US?
- Do you already have an internet merchant account?
From these answers we can usually recommend someone to call for a quote. Out of curiosity, I ran some statistics to determine who were the most popular credit card gateways (this excludes PayPal and 2Checkout):
Authorize.net is the clear winner in the popularity contest. This indicates it may be the best payment gateway solution for a small business services company based in the US.
For those of us based in Canada, PSiGate is the winner, although their only competition is a company that used to be called Paradata, but was recently purchased by Payment Processing, Inc.
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11:19 am
[...] The fact of the matter is that PayPal is extremely popular, a quick look at all of the FreshBooks small business users shows that a whopping 30% of all active users are completing transactions with PayPal, compared with the next leading gateway Authorize.net at 6%. [...]
1:40 pm
I’ve been looking for someone to publish Payment Gateway Statistics. Thank you for posting this. Did you know that Paypal bought out Verisign? So now I wonder who is more popular? But I have to say, my clients on Verisign are having a few problems during Verisign’s transition — longer Tech Support time, not knowing which tech support email to contact, Errors connecting to the payment gateway and duplicate order entries. Hopefully, they’ll fix all these bugs ASAP!
1:48 pm
Hi Customer Focused Creative,
It’s good to know you are getting value out of these numbers. I will publish more statistics as they accumulate.
I did hear about PayPal’s purchase, and I was very nervous, here are a few posts about it:
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2006/05/23/is-paypal-dropping-the-ball/
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2006/06/27/paypal-has-dropped-the-ball/
Thanks,
Levi
12:37 pm
Just so you know, Landmark does not have it’s own payment gateway, it just provides its users with the iTransact payment gateway.
Also, Authorize.Net was recently purchased by CyberSource and it’s resellers are beginning to offer services to Canadian companies. The catch is that you must aquire an American merchant account through Authorize.Net’s resellers.
I would be interested to see where the Cyber Source Advanced and Essentials payment gateways fit in here, since they do business primarily with fortune 500 companies.
3:43 pm
Hmm, are these stats based on popularity or merchant size? Just because someone is using a Payment Gateway does not always mean they like them.
4:08 pm
Hi Robs,
I guess the title is supposed to be kind of a joke Yes as you mentioned these stats are based purely on usage. It has nothing to do with how well liked each gateway is. I’m sure if we did a survey, we could find out though.
- Levi
11:53 pm
With VersaPay you can use Authorize.net or PSI*Gate with your Canadian merchant account. Rates range from 2%-2.89% depending on the site of your business.
Get local canadian personal service with your VersaPay merchant account with the brilliance of freshbooks invoicing!
8:16 am
Hi, payment gateway can be a very useful solution for a small business services company.
Regards
3:26 pm
Many people focus on rates (for obvious reasons), but the gateway you choose will also impact the processing currencies you can support. As e-commerce matures, expect more cardholders to want to pay in their local currency. It’s a significant marketing advantage, particularly for North American customers targeting customers overseas. We specialize in handling multi-currency processing, and is a criteria I recommend my clients at least consider before deciding which gateway they are going to put their transactions through.