I have worked on ecommerce projects for clients from various countries. In this post I am going to explain few of the issues faced by the clients from various countries. I was hired by clients to help their vendors deliver the product as per the specification. Most of the projects faced issue related to only one area in the website i.e payment gateway. I have already written a post on how to choose your payment gateway.
Do a POC on payment gateway
The client had outsourced the development to a company and they were working on all the features and in their project plan payment gateway integration was the last step. I asked the client not to signoff the statement of work until the service provider delivers a POC (proof-of-concept) using the payment gateway that the client had already bought after my evaluation. The service provider was not able to integrate the payment gateway in a POC hence the deal was called off. I helped client hire another company which did POC successfully. It is better for companies to do a complete POC on Payment Gateway before starting the development of the project. In the project plan it is important to have the payment gateway integration task in sprint 1 or 2 not at the end. I have seen this one feature has delayed the go live for the project by several weeks.
Payment gateway application approval
Unlike USA other countries don’t have a fast and easy approval of payment gateway account. In developing countries you need to submit lot of documents including bank account details and letter from bank for approval. This process takes even few months. In one of the projects the client postponed it till the development was complete. The team waited for 2 months to get this integration done. If this is the first time you are launching an ecommerce website then proceed with payment gateway application process in the very beginning.
More than one payment gateway
It is also advisable to have more than one payment gateway accounts approved with different companies. This plan B helped one of my client to launch their website on time, even though the primary gateway provider had some technical difficulty in accepting some types of payments the alternate payment gateway helped us launch the website on time. Link different bank account for each payment gateway account if needed.
Same payment gateway account for multiple domains
In developing world the payment gateways may be approved for only the domain it was requested. If the same account was used on multiple domains then the payments may be declined by the payment processor. One of my clients had this problem when they wanted to add one more domain to their website the client has to contact the payment gateway to get this approved.
Payment processing company payment schedule
Payment gateway companies don’t pay you on a daily basis for the transactions that were submitted by your website. One of the clients promised the supplier to pay every week but the problem was that the payment processor company paid only once a week and sometimes that was also delayed because the payment processing company would send a cheque instead of directly remitting it into the company’s bank account. This delay caused the company to have financial problem with suppliers and have to plan things alternatively.
Currency conversion affecting product margin
The client chose a payment gateway that supported multiple currencies. The problem happened when the amount remitted to the client’s account was off by a considerable percentage. The currency value used for conversion was below what banks provided and there was a fee associated with remittance and currency conversion this affected the profit margin on various products and the client increased the product price to cover that loss but they started to lose market share.
Integration with backend systems
The client opted for a SAAS ecommerce solution and it was very appealing in the beginning since it was very cheap to host a store. The problem started when the products listed on the site grew exponentially. The client was not able to fulfill orders on time and lot of items were on backorder. The reason the client was not able to integrate their backend supply chain software with the SAAS solution they bought for their store front.
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