How To Know Which Payment Methods You Need?
There is only one way to learn which payment methods you should have in your online tool.
This one and only way is called research.
Credit cards are the most popular payment methods in the world. PayPal is also popular. But not everywhere.
So what you need to do first, is to learn where your customers/users are from. Go to Google Analytics or any other tool you use to analyse the activity on your website and take a look at the location data (in Google Analytics you can find it in Audience -> Geo -> Location).
Now take a look at this list of countries.
Let’s say your customers are from the United States, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. Let’s say that the audience is distributed evenly – 25% of your users per each of these countries.
Now what you need to do is to learn what kind of payment methods are popular in these countries.
So simply type in “payment methods in country” in Google and read. With this small research you will learn that:
- for US and Canadian customers credit cards will be enough (Visa, MasterCard and American Express). You may also want to offer PayPal as a payment method, because lots of people like paying using PayPal in these countries
- for customers from Germany you will need to have something more: credit cards (Visa, MasterCard), PayPal and Sofortbanking or Giropay. And if you want to offer subscription-based services, you should also offer SEPA direct debits
- for customers from the Netherlands the most important thing is to offer payments through iDEAL. The rest (Visa, MasterCard, PayPal) is also fine, but it won’t elicit as many transactions as iDEAL. And – like in Germany – it’s also recommended to have SEPA direct debits if you offer subscription-based services
And that’s all. Now you need to find a Payment Service Provider that offers all of these payment methods or simply implement all of them one by one.
So is it hard to learn how your users want to pay?
No, absolutely not. It’s as simple as that.
But if you need any help with that – don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to assist with whatever you have doubts about.
