In India, payment gateways are experiencing growth at light speed. According to Research and Markets, the digital payment gateway market in the country was valued at $16.2 billion in 2024 and is estimated to grow to $32.96 billion by 2030. These numbers hint that there is a competitive market for payment gateways in India.
Thus, it is essential to cut through the noise and select the right payment gateway because it directly impacts your business’s conversion rates and revenue. Additionally, a good payment gateway helps ensure smooth transactions across borders for various payment methods and modes.
This blog provides you with a structured framework for evaluating various payment gateways, empowering you with a comparison key for technologies in India and the globe.
Key Factors to Evaluate When Choosing a Payment Gateway
There are six critical factors that impact the quality and performance of a payment gateway:
1. Uptime & Reliability
Uptime and reliability directly impact customer experience and business reputation. Ideally, it is recommended to select a payment gateway with 99.9% uptime to ensure smooth transactions and consistency.
Payment gateways with real-time transaction monitoring enable you to identify potential problems and prevent failures. Plural by Pine Labs offers payment gateways with instant tracking, reconciliation, and high uptime to ensure high-quality transactions.
2. Payment Success Rates
The desired transaction success rate in payment gateways is 98% or higher. Every payment gateway has different success rates for various reasons, like system compatibility problems, network latencies that cause time-outs, system glitches, etc.
To enhance payment success rates, consider adopting smart routing to dynamically select the most optimal payment processor for each transaction. This method considers factors like payment method, transaction history, etc.
Plural offers one of the highest success rates with late authorization and third-party validation.
3. Integration & Developer-Friendliness
It is crucial to consider implementation time, service downtime, and ease of assimilation for a gateway to be truly impactful. Integration and implementation tools like SDKs, Sandbox environments, and APIs make quick implementation possible.
Plural makes implementation easy by providing multiple integration modes (Redirect, iFrame, SDKs, etc.) and developer-friendly APIs.
4. Scalability & Performance
Scalability is critical for payment gateways to address peak volumes during high-traffic seasons, like Black Friday or Diwali sales. You also require multicurrency and cross-border payment to facilitate easy checkouts for global customers.
With Plural, you get the advantage of seamless onboarding, high transaction capacity, and a selection of over 100 payment methods.
5. Security & Compliance
Digital transactions are susceptible to breaches and cyberattacks, making security and compliance an important feature. It is important to look for PCI DSS compliance to keep cardholder data safe. Tokenization features help encrypt payment data and fraud detection tools like CVV checks, 3D secure authentication, and more.
Compliance with RBI and global regulatory standards helps ensure safety during transactions. Plural offers tokenizers for secure data storage and robust fraud prevention.
6. Customer Support & Issue Resolution
A reliable, accessible customer support system helps you troubleshoot when you need it. Look for 24×7 issue resolution channels and availability of technical documentation and developer forums to access self-help.
With Plural, you get dedicated customer support and API documentation for easy troubleshooting.
Understanding Payment Gateway Pricing Models
While features are an important consideration for payment gateway selection, value for money is equally critical in decision-making.
Payment gateways either have a flat fee or a percentage-based pricing. A flat fee means paying a fixed fee per transaction regardless of the amount. A percentage-based fee means that you pay a percentage of the transaction amount as the fee.
For small and growing businesses, flat fees deliver predictable costs because transaction sizes are relatively smaller. On the other hand, for larger enterprises a percentage-based fee makes more sense.
Set up a meeting with your payment provider to clarify hidden charges like setup fees, refund fees, chargeback fees, etc., to avoid surprises.
Future-Proofing Payments for Compliance & Growth
Digital transaction technologies are rapidly evolving, which makes it important to be prepared for future compliance and growth:
- Consider setting up automated compliances for tokenization by RBI and Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) measures.
- For international transactions, set up compliance for GDPR.
- Adopt a multi-gateway approach to enhance the scalability and agility of your gateways.
- Implement AI-powered fraud detection and risk mitigation measures to stay safe.
To demonstrate, read this case study about how Plural helped Croma boost its QoQ growth by 188% using payment links. 70% of all EMI transaction traffic at Croma now goes through Plural gateways.
Why Plural Payment Gateway Stands Out
There are several reasons that make Plural the ideal choice for businesses of all sizes:
1. Infrastructure
Plural offers a robust digital infrastructure with high-grade security, making it ideal for businesses handling large transaction volumes daily.
2. Features
Plural offers several key functionalities such as:
- Affordability Suite to offer modern payment options like BNPL and EMIs
- Plural Tokenizer to secure card data
- UPIVerse that offers a full tech stack for UPI payments
3.mIntegrations
Plural offers developer-friendly APIs with easy integrations to Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, Cordova, and more.
4. Industry-Specific Solutions
Plural provides industry-specific solutions for high speed transactions and enhanced functionality:
- Ecommerce: Discounts, cashbacks, brand EMIs, and more
- EdTech: EMIs on course fees
- BFSI: High success rates for transactions
Explore more features of the Plural payment gateway here.
Conclusion
Selecting the right payment gateway involves the evaluation of four parameters: security, scalability, rates, and pricing. A well-chosen payment gateway has the potential to drive higher conversions while reducing transaction failures.
Leverage this handbook to make a meaningful shortlist that can help you select the right payment gateway for your business. If you require high success rates, robust security, seamless integrations, and custom solutions for every business need,
To get started with Plural – contact us
