Ecommerce best checkout solutions

[Aquarius909]

I'd be curious to learn what people think the best payment/checkout system for a website is.

We currently use Sagepay with First Data and they're OK but First Data are very expensive and very difficult to deal with so I'd like to switch. The options I've looked at are:

Paypal Braintree - Paypal also seem difficult to deal with (for small merchants like us) but I'm hearing this platform has one of the highest conversion rates
Stripe - Loved by developers but apparently they have problems paying USD to transferWise and this would be a big concern for us
checkout.com - I came across these guys at the Ecommerce Expo and they talk a good game but I'd never heard of them

Our website is on Magento (1.9 but we'll move soon to ver 2) and turns over about £500k pa. What is the best solution here?

[jammy-git]

Magento has probably one of the worst checkout workflows out of the box amongst nearly all of the ecommerce platforms. Though the options you've discussed really are only payment gateways.

You can either have a on-site payment gateway, or a hosted solution. The difference is essentially, if it looks like the user is entering their CC details in to a form on your site, it's an on-site solution. If they are redirected to another page to enter their details, it's hosted.

I'd say PayPal is actually one of the better hosted payment gateways and PayPal Express Checkout would bypass the awful Magento checkout process.

As for a hosted solution, I prefer Stripe or Square. Not had any clients or heard of the issues with USD payments and I think the UX of entering CC details with them is the best around. To improve the Magento checkout flow there are quite a few extensions, but I can't say I've come across one yet that 1) is coded well 2) has a nice design and 3) has decent UX.

The best checkout workflow I've come across on an ecommerce site is on Vivo Barefoot: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/ I don't think I've used such a quick and painless checkout workflow since. I'd LOVE to have built a 1 page checkout plugin for Magento 1 using this workflow as a base.

[dartissimus]

We use Shopify as a platform and card payment is through Stripe on Shopifypayments, they charge an extra 1% to use any other merchant provider.

We also use Paypal who have just increased their rate thresholds which has doubled their monthly charge for us. I'd like to drop them but they represent 60% of sales to 40% on Stripe.

The significant point is they both seem to work extremely well, and compared to Amazon or Ebay they're cheap as chips

[khushy]

Hi

We use paypal and stripe

For ease of customer use - imho - you cannot beat stripe

56% stripe 44% pp for us - there are cheaper providers - but they are clunky as hell, from a customer experience perspective.

[russy01]

We use Braintree, ok. But terrible customer service.

Considering going back to paypal payments pro.

[DSLiverpool]

Don’t walk Zombie like into Magento 2, the money you save on Big Commerce Or Shopify will go a long way in free marketing money. That’s a webbuild save and a monthly dev saving as well.

Read Paul Rogers independent comparison!

Checkout - I can’t speak for Big but Shopify has been perfected over the years and is pretty nailed on. We’ve just integrated a checkout.com / Shopify plus for a client pulling £1m a month through cards and it worked out reasonable for them. The actual built in version isn’t that bad cost wise as genuine card transactions are taken over by a myriad of other options. Stripe has to go to 3 day to bank to compete.

If you are considering checkout.com we have the main Uk guy as our affiliate contact and happy to intro.

[Canute]

If you have a lot of products, I'd strongly avoid Shopify for now.

You have Magento, even though it can be a pain the in rear, it will afford you more opportunity for organic search than Shopify ever will, just that there is a premium attached, but at least you have that option. The payment solution is the challenge here.

I can't vouch for it 100% but might be worth looking into https://www.klarna.com as I believe they are now offering a variety of checkout solutions.

[Aquarius909]

HI All, thank you for your contributions to this thread.

Let me pick up on a few points:

@jammy-git Magento's own checkout is clunky but we paid for a separate Model. Initially we have OneStepCheckout - which is, as the name suggests, a one page checkout solution for Magento so I hope it help you to be aware of this - but now it's something else but similar. I therefore believe we have side-stepped the Magento checkout issues

@jammy-git Hosted solution is always best IMO. I don't want the responsibility of having all those credit card details onsite.

@DSLiverpool I am at risk of sleepwalking into Magento 2 but mainly because I can't get any good independent advice on my options. Can you post a link to the Paul Rogers article please?

@DSLIverpool It turns out checkout.com will only take you on if you turnover £100k+ pm and we're not in that league

@russy01 Paypal are awful to deal with. I sent them a query last week about how they handle USD payments and the reply I got didn't answer my question but asked me a load of data-gathering questions about my business, the turnover, sales mix etc. Truly awful. I replied with the answers 4 days ago and still haven't heard back. Truly awful. So I am going to need some convincing that I should sign ups with them but I'm waiting to hear anyway. We have Paypal on the site at the moment but we nudge people away from it and try to get more people to use the CC checkout. A little nudge does help.

So it looks like we'll be switching to Stripe here. They're not cheap but all reviews are positive and at least their pricing structure is clear. I'll keep you guys posted on how it goes and thanks again for your input to this discussion.

[DSLiverpool]

https://paulnrogers.com/magento-vs-shopify-plus-in...

You can access all Paul’s content from that link.

I can speak to checkout for you if you feel you have growth potential

Stripe gone to 3 day payment is much better

If you pm me your site we will honestly tell you if shopify suits your route to market.

You don’t need Shop plus until £800k t/o unless you want complex integrations. so €129 a month.

I’m on holiday this week but happy to have a chat just pm me.

[MrSparks]

Aquarius909 said:

@DSLiverpool I am at risk of sleepwalking into Magento 2 but mainly because I can't get any good independent advice on my options. Can you post a link to the Paul Rogers article please?

We recently moved all our sites from Magento 1 to Shopify and whilst I was really against it initially it's been the best thing we've done in a long time.

With our small budgets we were just struggling on Magento and needed a whole lot more money to get the sites where we needed them. We've completely surpassed our Magento sites since going to Shopify, we've had a few things custom coded but nothing's stopped us or not been possible. Our conversion rates are up over 100%, unfortunately our traffic is down so we're still playing catch up but at least I'm not worried about core functions of the site not working, instead I'm focused on new product ranges, marketing and advertising.

Shopify payments also lets you take payment in local currencies.

Personally from my own experience so far in ecommerce the only reason I'd go back to Magento is if we were turning over 5+ million and needed specific functionality that Shopify can't handle. (not found that yet though). Doesn't mean Magento is bad, it's just a different league if you're not a developer. Achieving simple things was so bloody hard on Magento, now we can do almost anything without too much aggro!

[shopper150]

I know Magento comes in for a lot of stick, but it's really flexible if you want to change or processes

Shopify is obviously very popular, but I think unless you are going straightforward selling, but I think they charge monthly and take the % of your turnover.

[MrSparks]

shopper150 said:

I know Magento comes in for a lot of stick, but it's really flexible if you want to change or processes

Shopify is obviously very popular, but I think unless you are going straightforward selling, but I think they charge monthly and take the % of your turnover.

Only on the lowest plan.

All other plans you pay a payment fee which is slightly more than competitors but overall feels worth it.

If you choose a different gateway then they do add 1% though.

We pay a bit more than we did with Stripe but have removed a massive headache so it’s worth every penny.

[Mr Overheads]

OP I've got contact at First Data, ping me a pm and I'll put you in touch. It might be that you're too small for him personally but perhaps he can put you in touch with a better account manager.

We're just moving a client (£25m t/o) across to First Data because they were extremely competitive and offered multiple solutions and integrations for this diverse clients needs. So it sounds like you just have the wrong setup on a bad deal.

[DSLiverpool]

MrSparks said:

Aquarius909 said:

@DSLiverpool I am at risk of sleepwalking into Magento 2 but mainly because I can't get any good independent advice on my options. Can you post a link to the Paul Rogers article please?

We recently moved all our sites from Magento 1 to Shopify and whilst I was really against it initially it's been the best thing we've done in a long time.

With our small budgets we were just struggling on Magento and needed a whole lot more money to get the sites where we needed them. We've completely surpassed our Magento sites since going to Shopify, we've had a few things custom coded but nothing's stopped us or not been possible. Our conversion rates are up over 100%, unfortunately our traffic is down so we're still playing catch up but at least I'm not worried about core functions of the site not working, instead I'm focused on new product ranges, marketing and advertising.

Shopify payments also lets you take payment in local currencies.

Personally from my own experience so far in ecommerce the only reason I'd go back to Magento is if we were turning over 5+ million and needed specific functionality that Shopify can't handle. (not found that yet though). Doesn't mean Magento is bad, it's just a different league if you're not a developer. Achieving simple things was so bloody hard on Magento, now we can do almost anything without too much aggro!

Good expo Craig, I always add that the ongoing "can I just add this" costs are far less on Shopify as its either an app or coded and if coded its far simpler code. Our most complex replat will be going live in a week or so, its been a massive job that needed full on bearding.

[Aquarius909]

Mr Overheads said:

OP I've got contact at First Data, ping me a pm and I'll put you in touch. It might be that you're too small for him personally but perhaps he can put you in touch with a better account manager.

We're just moving a client (£25m t/o) across to First Data because they were extremely competitive and offered multiple solutions and integrations for this diverse clients needs. So it sounds like you just have the wrong setup on a bad deal.

Thank you but I will decline. Too much water under the bridge with First Data for me I'm afraid. They've not done right by us and I feel I need to draw a line.

[Aquarius909]

MrSparks said:

We recently moved all our sites from Magento 1 to Shopify and whilst I was really against it initially it's been the best thing we've done in a long time.

With our small budgets we were just struggling on Magento and needed a whole lot more money to get the sites where we needed them. We've completely surpassed our Magento sites since going to Shopify, we've had a few things custom coded but nothing's stopped us or not been possible. Our conversion rates are up over 100%, unfortunately our traffic is down so we're still playing catch up but at least I'm not worried about core functions of the site not working, instead I'm focused on new product ranges, marketing and advertising.

This is a compelling story but can I ask two questions please:
1) Why did you lose traffic when you converted to Shopify?
2) And why did your conversion rate go up?

[DSLiverpool]

From experience Shopify is no worse than anything else, a google re-platforming to any platform will *temporarily* affect the traffic. Each redirect knocks roughly 10% off it's value to Google, but it only usually lasts 6-8 weeks.

This is normally tackled by increasing paid traffic until the organic recovers.

[MrSparks]

Aquarius909 said:

This is a compelling story but can I ask two questions please:
1) Why did you lose traffic when you converted to Shopify?
2) And why did your conversion rate go up?

1) It wasn’t directly down to the website move. It was a gradual decline over this year as we had not been posting any new content, doing any SEO work etc. as we were too busy trying to get Magento where we wanted it and ignoring the existing sites. I’d also made a poor decision to move the blog to a different domain. It was a big mistake on my part. I’ve moved websites numerous times now and if you’re diligent with 301 re directs then you should be fine.

2) where do I start? Site looks better, it’s faster, has Apple Pay and PayPal express checkout, the site is better laid out and easier to use, the search function actually works, we used the migration as an opportunity to streamline and improve category flows, it’s amazing on mobile, we can send quotes/draft orders which is big for us, we’ve got enhanced e-commerce tracking finally so I can see what’s going on and alter marketing to suit, product feeds to google/Facebook update daily. We’ve just added Codisto Linq and have significantly increased our eBay listings too. The list goes on.

All of this is possible on Magento obviously but most of the above didn’t work for us and would have cost lots to get all the basics working properly whereas it’s pretty much good to go on Shopify.

Dave (DS Liverpool) gave me some great advice and I wish we could have afforded for them to make the site, but ultimately if you’re relatively good at websites and have a decent freelancer you can achieve a whole lot on Shopify without spending a fortune.