The payment landscape has completely changed over the last few years. Today, customers are exposed to a fresh, unique, efficient and seamless payment environment. This is the main reason why businesses have to keep up with the changing payment landscape in order to keep their customers satisfied and happy. And the best way to achieve this is by integrating a secure payment gateway. If you’ve already done so, here are some amazing features of payment gateways that you should know about! 

The efficiency of payment gateways depends on their features. 

Best Features of a Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is one of the most critical parts of a business. While there are thousands of payment gateways available in the market, each one comes with its own set of features and functionalities. In fact, the performance and efficiency of your payment gateway entirely depends on its features.

Payment gateways let you collect payments from your customers in  the easiest way. 

Having said that, below are some of the most powerful features of payment gateways that help businesses in a great way, check these out:

1. Powerful Dashboard For Easy Access 

Payment reconciliation is definitely one of the most important tasks for businesses. At the end of every day, you need to determine how much payment you’ve received and from where, how much is collected and how much is pending and so on. This is where the advanced dashboard offers great help. It allows the users to track and monitor their cash flow, learn about the payment sources, check the total and outstanding amount, manage and initiate the transactions, with a few clicks. Besides, it offers deep insight into your cash flow that goes in and out of your business. 

2. International Payment Methods 

Accepting international payments is a point where most domestic businesses struggle. If you’re already operating or planning to reach global markets, then you need to have a way to collect payments from your international customers. To help businesses in this, some good payment gateways offer multiple currency features using which you can collect payments from any part of the world. Not just that, they also support the preferred payment options of your global customers. Know that this feature doesn’t exclusively come with every other payment gateway, if you’re planning to go global, then select the one that is paired with such features. 

3. Express Payments 

According to a customer report, nearly 25% of customers leave the site without purchasing anything, simply because they are asked to create an account for completing the purchase.  This indicates that customers don’t intend to waste a lot of time in order to make payments, instead, they need easy and quick ways. Express payment is a feature offered by some of the best payment gateways, it allows quick payments without requiring customers to create an account or fill in any details. 

4. Instant Refunds 

In an era where everything is instant, it is normal for customers to expect instant refunds. The instant refund feature has become a necessity for payment gateways. It not only offers a great customer experience but also helps you gain the trust and loyalty of the customers. On the other hand, if your payment system doesn’t offer an instant refund feature, you may struggle in increasing sales and profits, simply because customers are reluctant to trust and shop from the sites that don’t provide a refund feature. 

5. Recurring Payments /Subscriptions 

Subscriptions allow you to set up an automated invoicing cycle for your customers. This feature is especially helpful for businesses that have a monthly payment structure. As a matter of fact, the subscription model boosts revenue generation to a great level. Besides, this feature also helps in saving a good amount of upfront fee by automating the billing cycle of customers. So, make sure that your payment gateway supports this feature. 

6. Easy Settlements 

Liquidity crunches are pretty common in the online payment environment. However, with the right payment gateway, you don’t have to suffer as they offer an excellent settlement feature. 

Having a merchant account is very important in order to maintain a cash flow in the business. Wondering what a merchant account is? It is an account separate from your personal bank account, which is used to collect and hold the funds until they’re approved by the bank of the customer. Once the fund is approved, it is then transferred into your account. This process can take anywhere from 3 to 5 days or sometimes even more. 

The payment gateways that come with instant settlement feature, don’t let you wait for longer and reflect the payment you’ve earned shortly. This helps in maintaining the much-needed balance in transaction management. 

7. UPI Payments

Unified Payments Interface or UPI has become the most popular payment mode in India. It has even left the card payment option behind, which is very surprising. The main reason behind its popularity is, it allows customers to pay in seconds without having to fill in their card or banking details on the sites. So, if your payment gateway doesn’t come with this feature, you might have to suffer. 

The best payment gateways let your customers pay via UPI, which gives them satisfaction and peace of mind. 

8. PCI-DSS Compliance 

To help you gain the trust of your customers, payment gateways come with tight security features and PCI-DSS compliance is one of them. 

 Secure payment processing helps in transferring the funds and sensitive data over a network without exposing it to security risks and threats. Payment gateways come with fraud detection technology, PCI-DSS compliance, data encryption, SSL certification, etc. to provide you and your customers a safe online payment processing environment. 

These are a handful of features that make payment gateway a safe, secure and trusted mode of collecting and processing payments. Selecting the right payment gateway isn’t very hard if you know your business needs and what your customers want. The above-mentioned features will help you select the right service and make the most out of it. So, what are you waiting for? Find out these features and leverage their full capabilities.