Partnership between web developers and payment services key to e-commerce success

The quality of the relationship between a web developer and a payment services provider is one of the key ingredients of a successful e-commerce website, says Michael Richards of SiteMeUp Online Marketing.

“Our job is to help our clients grow their business online,” says Richards. “One part of that is building sites that are easy to use and highly visible to search engines; but an equally important part is making sure that the shopping cart and payment gateway are flexible and robust enough to meet all the client’s needs as they grow.”

Richards says PayGate is SiteMeUp’s preferred partner because of its reliability, the quality of its support and the breadth of its product offering. “My clients put their trust in me, so I have to be confident that I’m recommending something that works. With PayGate, I know my clients will get the reliable service they need — and PayGate’s well-documented API enables us to tailor payment services to the client’s requirements.”

“One of the biggest changes our clients have to absorb when they choose e-commerce is that their shop never shuts,” adds Richards. “There are no normal trading hours, and you have to be able to accept payments 24/7. That makes it essential to choose a payment provider who has an excellent track record in terms of uptime.”

“Transactions do sometimes fail,” says Richards, “because the payments process is complex, with many different parties involved, and there are many points where it can go wrong. But when that happens, our clients need us to be able to explain exactly what’s happened and what we might be able to do it prevent the problem recurring in future. PayGate is always available to help us provide those explanations.”

From a technical point of view, Richards says Site Me Up values PayGate’s range of customisable products and its recent offer of free shopping cart software. “This shows how much PayGate values its developer community. To offer the best service to my clients I need access to a good variety of shopping carts, and PayGate has most of what I need, including WooCommerce, WordPress, Magento, Opencart, Virtuemart and Zencart among others. All of that is just a click away, and we know it’s compatible with the gateway, which helps us save on development time and resources.”

“The developer community is really important to us,” says PayGate’s general manager of business development, Brendon Williamson.  “We’re making sure sure we give them all the information and tools they need to make their jobs easy. The developer section of our site now includes an comprehensive library of technical documents as well as tested shopping carts which we are committed to supporting.”