Payment methods in WooCommerce stores and how to choose the most appropriate method

WooCommerce has become the most widely used and popular e-commerce platform, with 5 million active users worldwide and supporting more than 64 languages. Therefore, you find many articles and videos on the Internet that explain how to use it and benefit from it.

And with the expansion of its use in e-commerce sites, it has become important to expand the linking of various payment methods with it in order to facilitate its use by anyone and anywhere in the world. And because collecting payments is the goal and goal behind operating your online store, it is worth paying attention to benefiting from the benefits of electronic payment methods, which are as follows:

1. Speed: Payment and transfer take place in a few minutes safely, without bothering yourself with the follow-up to collecting the profits of each single sale.
2. Convenience and ease: Your expansion in providing different payment methods makes it easier for your customers to pay, which increases your chances of selling and collecting profits, especially with the increase in the spread of electronic payment methods.
3. Increased sales: To encourage more customers to buy from your store, as we mentioned in the previous point.
4. Increasing the profit margin: as it is faster and increases your sales, thus increasing the speed of capital turnover. 
5. Lower cost than traditional payment methods, especially with regard to collecting money from customers outside your country.
   It has also become an alternative to hiring a person responsible for following up on each payment process. Payment here is made electronically for a large number of transfers and financial procedures automatically.
6. Security: (while taking the necessary measures), it reassures the customer of protecting him from exposure to fraud, thus increasing his confidence in your store, as well as protecting you from fake payments and fraud.

In our article today, we will focus on explaining the many electronic payment methods that can be used with WooCommerce, such as: major credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers, checks and cash on delivery. With an explanation of how to install and use it with WooCommerce, and also focus on the easiest ways to use for our Arab region. But before talking about it, we simplify the concept of the payment process, then mention the criteria that you need to consider when choosing the payment methods that you will use on your site, and then present the optimal payment methods for you.

Simplify the online payment process: 

To simplify the process that takes place in electronic payment, we list it in the following steps:

How to choose the right payment methods for your customers

Below we advise you of the most important criteria that you need to take care of in choosing the appropriate payment gateway:

1. Is it integrated with WooCommerce or is it standalone?

In one way or another, there is a way to link each payment gateway to your site, but there are payment gateways that have plugins ready for WooCommerce and other gateways that need to be linked through a developer. Here we will take care of the available additions ready to facilitate.

2. Accept your store’s main currency

Some payment gateways do not accept a large number of currencies and provide these currencies through the exchange rate (to which a commission is added for converting the exchange rate), and therefore not accepting your currency directly may cost you additional expenses.

3. Ease of working in your country (for you and your customers)

It is important to make sure that it accepts payment from the countries you sell to, as well as that you can withdraw and transfer your profits easily to you (mostly the profits are withdrawn to the visa or to your bank account that you register on the payment gateway website.

4. The amount of fees required at the level of each sale transaction

All electronic payment gateways take fees as a commission for each payment process that takes place in your store, and these fees differ from one gateway to another and according to the type of card used by the customer as well as the country from which you provide your services. Therefore, care should be taken to verify that you understand the fee structure before committing to a payment gateway for the long term. In general, the fees are in the range of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. There are also discounts that depend on the amount of sales that you achieve. The more you sell, the payment gateways provide you with offers with lower fees. 

Therefore, you should compare the service fees between each payment gateway and another, as you may have to increase the price of the service / product that you provide to compensate for the expenses of the payment fees, which raises the price for your customers, and this may lead to the non-acceptance of this high price by customers.

5. other fees

Some payment gateways add other fees such as money transfer fees directly to you or your bank account, subscription fees for the first time, annual fees, or others. It is important to be sure of all these fees, especially if you are starting a new store, as these costs come into play.

6. followed security protocol

The amount of security is very important, as the customer will not risk his bank statement, nor will you risk your profits for nothing. And this is one of the points that must be taken into account. Here we also recommend the safest solution, which is the use of iFrame or redirection (do not worry, this is provided by all payment gateways) meaning that the customer enters his payment data on the payment gateway website and not your site, as this gives better security to your customers and encourages them to deal with you.

Before entering the different payment methods, we advise you to make sure that the payment and collection settings work correctly, as you will be able to activate the basic payment methods, which are:

• Pay through PayPal, which is the most famous electronic bank in the world, and is supported in many Arab and foreign countries
• Cash on delivery, so that the customer pays cash to the shipping representative as soon as he delivers the product
• Payment through direct bank transfer, where the customer can transfer to your bank account, then sends you the transfer number, and after reviewing your bank account and making sure that the transfer is complete, you implement the customer’s request.
• Paying through checks is when the customer sends you a check for the amount, and after you cash it, you implement the customer’s request.

You can adjust these settings from the aforementioned article, by adjusting the WooCommerce settings. Then, in this article, we will continue to expand the addition of other payment methods.

You can also use more than one payment gateway, as this has the advantage of making your customer choose what he prefers, but it also has a disadvantage that your sales will be divided into more than one gateway, as this may increase the cost of your payment gateways (you can start with one gateway and then test the point of adding other payment gateways with time on Your site to evaluate for yourself the amount of increased sales in exchange for increased payment fees and whether it is rewarding and required by customers or not).

Below we apply the above criteria to different payment methods:

1) PayPal 

Before talking about adding PayPal in your WooCommerce store, you need to open a merchant account with PayPal by following these steps:

1. In the beginning, you need to open a personal account from the PayPal website
2. Activate the e-mail through the message that will reach you. Here you can receive payments from friends and family but with limited values
3. Add your visa to PayPal to withdraw and transfer money to it (Paypal will activate it by sending a code to it that you will get from the bank issuing the visa card)
4. Here you can transfer and receive money through the transfer to your account, and to facilitate this, PayPal offers a paypal.me service solution ( explaining the service here ), as it gives you a link that you send to your customers in order for them to transfer an amount to you
5. Convert the account to a commercial account from here for free

With this, you have an active account that you can receive your payments through 3 different ways:

1. Send a paypal.me link directly to your customers so they can pay you.
2. Send a payment request to your customers, whether by sending an email to them or by sending an invoice (open your account on this link to choose any of the two options)
3. Collecting payments online by linking to your site, which we will explain in the following steps, but here we would like to point out that there are several ways to add PayPal to your site, depending on the required use, and we will refer to each method separately.

Use the PayPal Sandbox 

This method is not a direct installation of a payment gateway, but rather creating a test environment that simulates reality to test your online store and its compatibility with PayPal, thus ensuring that everything is in order.

The importance of this step in several points: 

• That if there are problems on your site and you have not discovered them yet, this means that your customers may encounter them and not inform you about them
• Errors may occur in the payment process and you may lose your money 
• And another important point is that you will make sure of the fee percentages that you understood so that you do not find that you are charged more fees than you expected, and you lose your profits.
• You will create fake accounts with which you will experience the payment process as the user experience
• Experiment with refund mechanisms to customers.
• Experiencing and understanding the notifications that accompany the payment process, such as: payment completion, cancellation, refund request, etc.

To try PayPal Sandbox, we do the following:

1. Open your site and head to the WordPress admin page
2. Click on “ WooCommerce ”, then “ Settings ”.
3. Select the “ Settings ” tab.

4.Choose to activate PayPal Standard as shown in the pictures. 

5.Click “ Setup ” and WooCommerce will take you to the PayPal settings page.

6. Make sure to choose “PayPal Standard Activation”
7. Type in the “Name” that the customer sees. (It is recommended to add the word testing or testing next to the name so that you can distinguish this account from the real account)
8. The email that you use in the PayPal account.
9.Choose “PayPal Test Activation”, click on “ Developer Account ”, which will take you to the PayPal website to open a sandbox account in it
10. Click on “ Developer Account ”, which will take you to the PayPal website to open a sandbox account in it.

11. You then enter the PayPal website with your real account, and then you create a number of fake accounts inside it:

• Let’s create a fake personal account from the United States of America (the country whose laws most affect the purchases of its citizens from outside their country, so there is no objection to trying it if you wish)
• Another fake personal account that PayPal will automatically create in your country
• A third dummy personal account from a third country of your choice. (created by you)
• A dummy merchant account will be created by PayPal automatically in your country.

12. By clicking on the three dots to the right of each account, you can change its data (as you wish, as they are fake accounts) in order to distinguish them easily.

13. Click the three dots, and then the API Credentials tab, in order to take the data required to link your site to PayPal, so we can go back to writing it on our site.

Thus, we have accomplished what is required from the PayPal site.

14. We then return to our website, in the required email field in step 8 we write the merchant account that we created in the PayPal Sandbox (here in the example: Your-Shop-testing@buisness.example.com ) 

15. Under API Credentials, write the data that you transferred from the PayPal Sandbox website.

16. We save the changes by clicking on (Save Changes).

Thus, we have finished adding the PayPal Sandbox as a payment method on the site, and you can do the full purchase experience until we are sure that everything is in order.

17. After that, you can repeat the previous steps, starting with step number 7, but disable the sandbox and put the real data, which you can get by logging in with your real account on this link to get real API Credentials.

Thus, you will have a PayPal payment method activated on your site

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2) Payment upon receipt 

The image above shows the second method of the most popular and reliable payment methods in your online store, and it is the most accepted in the Arab world, which is cash on delivery.

You can click on the “ set up ” button next to the payment method to be redirected to the page for setting up the payment method upon receipt, which opens the following page:

You also see in the following image the steps and fields that you must fill in in order to prepare and process the payment method upon receipt within your store. 

1. Activate or disable the payment method upon receipt within your store. 
2. The name is an address written on the payment method within the purchase page that appears to the customer upon order completion. You can write “This product is available for payment upon receipt” or any other text. 
3. Description In which you can write any descriptive text that appears to the customer during the purchase. 
4. Instructions: In it, you can put any instructions that you want the customer to see regarding payment upon receipt
5. Activation only for shipping methods: You can choose a specific shipping method for payment upon receipt to be activated, if you use more than one shipping method in your store. 
6. Acceptance of virtual orders: in which you can activate or stop payment upon receipt on virtual products such as e-books, pictures and other intangible products that the customer does not receive in his hand.

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3) Direct bank transfer 

The image above shows the third payment method available within the payment options in the WooCommerce store, and in this method the price of the sold products is transferred directly from the customer’s account to your bank account, where the customer himself transfers the money to your account outside the site or the store completely, and only attaches the transfer number Banking in the purchase order.

After the customer transfers the money from his bank account to your account, he will send you the bank transfer number, which you can check from within your bank account, and then you ship the product to the customer after confirming that the money has been successfully received. 

To activate this method, you can click on its “ Setup ” button to show you the settings page for configuring and customizing the direct bank transfer payment method:

As you can see in the image above, you can enter all the required data and instructions in order to set up the payment method using bank transfer.

On the settings page, as you can see in the image above, you can add your bank account data on which you want to receive money from your customers. You must be careful and add the data correctly so that no problems occur while the customer transfers money to you.

4) Payment by check (check) 

As you can see, you can activate the “check payments” option and click on the “Setup” button to be directed to the settings page for this payment method: 

On the Check Payment Method Setup page, put the details and instructions that appear to the customer during the completion of the order and choose the payment via checks. 

You must also add the data and information of the address you wish to receive the checks at, and the address must be written correctly so that you receive the checks by mail. After receiving the check, you can go to the bank and cash it to ensure that the payment is completed properly, and then you ship the product to the customer and complete the order.

5) Payment method by Visa/Master Card 

By default, there is no Visa or MasterCard payment method available with WooCommerce, but you can install a payment method that depends on the customer using the Visa Card or MasterCard that he owns in order to make the purchase and payment within your online store. First of all, you should know that activating the card payment option requires doing two necessary things: 

1. The first: Subscribing to a payment gateway

 Payment gateways are an electronic payment system provided by most banks in almost all countries of the world. Nowadays, Arab banks provide electronic payment gateways. You can go to the local bank in your country and request to subscribe to an electronic payment gateway, and after completing the procedures, the bank will deliver the data (codes) of the payment gateway to your online store). Later in the article, you will learn how to install the payment gateway codes to complete the installation of the payment gateway correctly. 

You can also subscribe to electronic payment gateways spread around the world, which we will explain to you one of them, and it does not require a lot of data from you, and you can subscribe to it online and get activation codes without the need to go to a local bank and do a lot of procedures.

2.  Installing a plugin through which the payment gateway codes can be installed 

In the first step, we explained that in order to be able to activate card payments in your store, you must have an electronic payment gateway. We will shortly explain to you the subscription to one of the payment gateways and how to fully activate it. 

As for this step, you will need to add a plugin in order to help you only to install the activation codes for the payment gateway that you have previously subscribed to. 

Most of the electronic payment gateways have their own add-on, and you can contact the technical support of the company from which you got the payment gateway and ask them about the name of their official add-on to activate the payment gateway codes on your site. 

A practical explanation for subscribing to an electronic payment gateway and installing it on the store using an add-on 

We explained to you theoretically in the previous paragraphs what you will need completely in order to be able to make payment available on a site using visa\master cards. 

Now let’s go to the scientific explanation, in which we will randomly choose one of the companies that gives you the opportunity to obtain an electronic payment gateway, and then explain to you the method of installing and setting up this payment gateway completely. 

Online payment gateway 2Check o ut 

This is one of the famous companies that provide an electronic payment gateway, and you can subscribe to it online in a few minutes and get the payment gateway data for your online store. 

Note : You can certainly use any other payment gateway, whether a payment gateway from a local bank in your country or an electronic payment gateway via the Internet. There are many, many companies that provide you with a payment gateway, and all of them perform almost the same performance, but the difference is in the level of security and also in the commission That each payment gateway takes from every sale made on your site. 

Regarding the 2checkout payment gateway, when entering its website, you will find that their prices start at 3.5% of each sale made on your store + in addition to an additional 35 cents on each sale. 

And they have subscription plans that charge a higher commission in return for providing you with a lot of payment options

 We assume that you have entered the company’s website and created an account with them, and of course it will provide you with all your data such as your email, username and password to open a new account with them, in addition to the link to your online store. 

After creating the account with them, you will have to contact the company’s technical support to request the activation of your account and the creation of an electronic payment gateway. 

After creating the account and activating the payment gateway for your online store by the company’s technical support, you will now log into your account in the company to find API codes and data that you can copy and add inside the code of your store to link successfully. 

In this case, the company provides an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that you can install on your site to help you connect API data to successfully activate the payment gateway.

This is the add-on that helps you link the payment gateway data to your online store, and you can certainly get the name of the add-on from the technical support of the company from which you got the payment gateway. As each company provides its own addition only to the linking process. 

After installing the add-on or any other add-on belonging to the company from which you obtained the payment gateway, immediately after that you will find an additional payment option that appeared to you on the payment settings page of the woocommerce add-on:

As the picture above shows, a new payment option appears, which allows the customer to purchase with multiple payment methods, including credit card and others, and the available payment methods differ according to the company from which you obtained the payment gateway and the options that it provides to you.

You can click on the “Setup” button next to the new payment method to be transferred to the page from which you can link the API data of the payment gateway that you obtained from any company or bank you chose:

As you notice on the settings page, you will find some data that is required of you (this data differs from one company to another, since if you obtained the payment gateway from a different bank or company, you will find that this data is different). 

All the data that is required of you on this payment setup page, you can find it inside your account that you opened in the company from which you got the payment gateway, whoever this company is. 

The following image shows the data for connecting the payment gateway from 2Checkout:

All you have to do is copy the payment gateway data from within your account in the company from which you obtained the payment gateway, and then paste that data into the payment settings page of the addition within your online store in the payment settings page. 

After successfully completing the linking process, the customer will see multiple payment methods for the payment gateway that you subscribed to, including Visa\master Card: 

Now, any purchase made on your site will be done through the payment gateway that you subscribed to from one of the different companies, and the money will be added to your account in the company and you can withdraw it from the company that provides the payment gateway according to the methods provided by the company and the time agreed upon for money transfer, where These things differ from company to company. 

Conclusion

There is a long list of different payment methods that you can connect to WooCommerce, but we tried to talk about the basic payment gateways, and you can also search online for electronic payment gateways to find dozens of banks and companies that provide this service all over the world. You can choose the company that you can trust based on Customer reviews and the extent of their popularity and support. Whatever company you choose, the most important thing is to choose the most popular method among your potential customers to provide them with an easier shopping experience.