An Overview Of The WooCommerce Payments System

Visitor experience on your site is important at every stage, including the payment process. If your system is difficult to navigate, clunky, and unprofessional-looking, you are likely to see an uptick in abandoned shopping carts stats.

You want to ensure a smooth process from the moment visitors hit your site until they have that order confirmation in their inbox. Choosing the right payment gateway is essential for the customer journey as well as an efficient process behind the scenes.

Until very recently, those running a WooCommerce site needed to use a third party payment gateway to take payments on their site. Now, WooCommerce has released it’s payment gateway on its platform. We look at WooCommerce Payments, the integrated solution from WooCommerce.

WooCommerce Payments

Earlier this year, WooCommerce released the much anticipated WooCommerce Payments feature. With this update, WooCommerce users were able to accept and process credit/debit card payments on their site as well as manager refunds and disputes.

All financial transactions can now all be done from directly within WooCommerce, rather than having to rely on an external gateway.

Streamlined process

WooCommerce Payments allows store owners to access payments from within WooCommerce itself, on a single, unified dashboard. No need to sign up to external gateways and jump between accounts. Less complicated, less time consuming, and less risk of fraud due to multiple accounts.

Store owners can also manage deposits and send money straight into their business bank account without having to leave the system.

360 overview

By being able to access everything from one dashboard gives a full overview of financials in one place. Store owners will be able to view:

• Sales
• Returns
• Abandoned shopping cart statistics
• Failed transactions
• Potential fraud issues
• Deposit status

No more jumping between payment gateways to consolidate and analyze data.

Requirements

At present, WooCommerce Payments is only available to US sites trading in US dollars. It is expected to roll out to other countries soon.

To use WooCommerce Payments, you need to have specific requirements in place:

• PHP 5.6+
• WordPress 5.3+
• WooCommerce 4.1+
• JetPack 5.3+
• Active SSL certificate

If you aren’t sure you meet these requirements, check with your hosting provider, who will be able to tell you what versions you are running.

Transaction fees

WooCommerce Payment transaction fees are in line with other similar payment gateways. The standard pricing model is 2.9% of the transaction + 0.30c. Depending on your monthly sales numbers, this could take a big chunk out of your profits.

Sellers with consistently high sales may be able to negotiate better rates directly with WooCommerce. Even a small decrease would represent a significant uplift in revenue.

If you are currently using a payment gateway with lower standard or negotiated rates, you’ll need to weigh up the benefits of having everything all in one interface against the savings made by using another payment system.

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