A payment gateway is a service that allows a retailer to accept a customer's payment; examples would be VISA or debt card.
The problem is that the number of such payment gateways, such as mobile payment replacements for cards, is expected to increase dramatically. From the merchants' point of view, the problem is that sales will be lost if the shop cannot handle these new gateways to Australia, such as Amazon, Authorize.Net, and SecurePay.com. These gateways are not small; they are huge overseas, and people will come who want to pay using these methods. If they are unable to, it will result in lost sales.
The first problem is that since the merchant account is small, its fees tend to be high. This can only be partly overcome by the introduction of surcharges, as some of these gateways have account-keeping charges. Saying a $US49 monthly account-keeping fee plus 10% is impossible to pass on to the one customer a month who buys a $A15 book.
The second problem is more serious. Although the Australian retailer now uses small gateways, there is still considerable work involved in making just one payment. You need to set up an account for each gateway, sign the necessary forms, activate it in your software, train staff on its use, and handle reconciliation, among other tasks. Until some of these build up to reasonable volumes, activating a gateway may not be worthwhile. In the meantime, sales will be lost.
Our current solution is to utilise payment gateways through Tyro, allowing them to manage the various gateways available. Since there is no commitment in Tyro, we do not see this as a problem for most of our clients.
The Tyro rates for these payment gateways are cheaper than going directly, plus our clients will have no hassles in use.
