How to accept credit card payments with WooCommerce
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a powerful open-source ecommerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce states that it has over 1 million downloads and 20% off all ecommerce sites worldwide are using the online shopping cart platform. The reason for its popularity is its simplicity and ease of installation. It is not uncommon for premade templates for WordPress to come with a preinstalled version of WooCommerce plugin. Many have found WooCommerce to be one of the most user friendly shopping carts on the market.
Why do I need a gateway for WooCommerce?
Woocommerce is a shopping cart plugin and not a payment gateway. Although it comes with the option to accept PayPal, that is typically not the best solution for most businesses. A gateway is needed to process credit cards such as VISA, MasterCard, Discover and AMEX. A gateway sends the acceptance or decline response back to WooCommerce letting your customer successfully process an order. From the gateway you can also setup a variety of security features that protect both you and your customers from fraud. A gateway can be easily connected to WooCommerce using a gateway specific plugin.
Reasons to not use PayPal?
PayPal is a great payment method but it has a lot of downsides, especially to businesses considered high risk. Often PayPal will cancel your account for any number of reasons and hold unreleased funds up to 21 days and in some cases even longer. PayPal’s transactions fees often are the highest in the industry.
Here are a few categories prohibited from using PayPal as a Merchant Service Provider:
Alcohol
Electronic Cigarettes and Eliquid
Firearms, including ammo and accessories
Jewelry
Tobacco
Tobacco related products
Which gateway is best for my WooCommerce store?
The best way is to get in contact with us and tell us a little more about your business. From there we can match your business with the right Merchant Service Account. From there we will help direct you to the best solution to fit your business needs. Merchant Competitor will help you with every step of the process to make sure you can smoothly and securely accept credit card transactions on your WooCommerce shopping cart.