Occupying the “growing business” space can be rough. Too big for beginner’s luck, too small to let inertia carry you forwards. It’s a crucial stage in the growth of your company, and the choices you make now can have consequences for years in the future. Not least of those choices is how you structure your payment process, and how you accept payments online. What tech to use? What methods to accept? How to stay secure but convenient? These are the questions that keep the heads of growing businesses up at night. Fortunately, they don’t have to. The best payment gateways exist precisely to help rising businesses of any type establish a payment solution that works securely and seamlessly, offering careful consultation and — when all goes right — the kind of partnership that makes for a meteoric rise.
The Human Element
Most bigger businesses have some sort of deal in place to maintain their online payment systems. For the already-established, it might be sufficient just to sign a dotted line and know that their online payment functionality is in safe hands, but businesses looking to expand can’t afford to stop there.
A growing business can’t just count on a provider’s tech, they need a true partner to make the most of their relationship and maximise growth. 
That means prioritising the human element alongside the technical, looking for a partner that can act as a consultant as you expand into new markets and technologies. One that’s available around the clock regardless of your timezone and theirs, always an email or phone call away, and ready to help with any payments-related query you could come up with, whether it’s how to open a merchant account or how to network more effectively. It can be the case that providers expect their clients to adapt to them, rather than the other way around. That can be disastrous when technical issues crop up, or new payment rules come in that affect your business, and you can’t get ahold of your client manager out-of-hours. Being unable to get in touch with your points of contact when you need them can be seriously detrimental to your conversion rates and long-term growth prospects. Rather than a provider who operates strictly, offering the exact same service to each of their clients, what you need is a flexible guide to growth.
Matchmaking
The ideal provider is one whose service is personalised to the most granular level. That means, ideally, a single point of contact with enough knowledge of the industry you operate in to write a doctoral thesis or two.
ECOMMPAY’s client managers keep track of trends in payments, tip you off about alternative payment methods to keep an eye on, put you in touch with new contacts, and attend so many fintech conferences that other attendees have started to think they’re part of the event staff.
All in all, what a growing business needs to consider when it chooses its payment gateway is, well, growth! Growth means hard work, and hard work needs hard workers, which is why you need to make sure your new partners have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from A to B2B. And a great provider will offer that consultancy without additional cost, recognising that your company’s growth is just as good for them as it is for you, putting you in touch with the people who can help your business expand into countless new regions and markets. Think of them as a kind of recon scout for growth, moving ahead of your business into new regions, cultivating networks that your business can rely on for a foothold as you make your move into new territories. If your provider doesn’t offer the aid of these kinds of highly-trained networkers, you risk turning your plans for expansion into runs down blind alleys. There’s simply no need to take that risk when payment providers who can help you avoid pitfalls are already out there.
Technological Supremacy
So what about tech? Does this mean you can afford to skimp on tech if your partners are suitably talented? Well, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the answer to that one is a big “No!”. All the diligence and expertise in the world won’t make much of a difference if your technical backend is always on the fritz. But that doesn’t mean you should just find out what all the other companies are using and buy that. Your tech should be as tailored to you as your consultant’s services. The tech that tracks and identifies fraudulent behaviour for, say, an airline company probably won’t do as good of a job in a bookshop, for example.
In order to grow, you need a solid foundation on which to grow, and the keystone of that foundation is tech that works for you, and you alone.
On the one hand, that means being able to customise the filters and detection criteria on your anti-fraud tech. Remember the airline and the bookshop? Some PSPs are all too happy to hand the same, uniform tech to both and call it a day, but that can spell catastrophe for your conversion, as perfectly legitimately customers find themselves ensnared in the byzantine workings of a fraud prevention system that’s operating on rules that don’t apply to your business. That’s precisely why ECOMMPAY invests itself so deeply in crafting fraud prevention tech that’s endlessly configurable, that lets you — the business — reach into it and tinker until it matches your needs precisely, and why we offer the service of personal fraud managers to help you do it, as part and parcel of our standard offering to growing businesses. Finding the perfect balance between security, customisability, and convenience should be an elemental part of the provider’s job.
So how do you pick a payment gateway? Turns out it’s not quite so simple as finding a one-size-fits-all solution. A growing business needs the complete package: dedicated consultants, deep expertise, and the teeth to back it all up on the technological front. At such a make-or-break phase in your company’s development, it’s simply not advisable to settle for anything less than a service that offers the best, and does so in such a way that suits you down to the ground. It’s only that kind of dedication that will see you grow out of the “growing” stage.
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