Do you collect, or want to collect, payments electronically through your website for a mobile app?

You would want to do it in a way that all the payments

• Are safely collected
• Are easy for the customers to make
• Reach your bank account with a minimum charge

A payment system that meets all the three above mentioned requirements is called all-inclusive. It makes sure that the payments are safely made, easily collected and reach you directly.

These three requirements are hard to fulfill with a single payment solution. There are a lot of payment solutions in the market, but finding and keeping a check on all of them is a hard job.

Dikonia has been helping businesses make e-commerce and business websites that need payment gateway solutions integrated into them. We have worked with Braintree, PayPal, Stripe and many other payment service providers.

Therefore, we’d like to present some really useful tips on how to make a payment environment that can help your businesses get paid, with minimum hassles. Sometimes, you have to go beyond just a payment page and try the latest solutions available with developers.

So, let’s get started with building a payment solution that’s all-inclusive.

The Basics

Before getting one installed, let’s see what a payment gateway exactly does and what it means.

What is a Payment Gateway?

A Payment Gateway is a digital service that handles payments from customers to a merchant using a secure authorization and transaction procedure. In simpler terms, it allows your customers to pay for purchases on your ecommerce website with integrity of the transactions intact.

Under the hood, a payment gateway integrates a banking service with the payment system, to collect funds from the customer’s account and transfer them to yours.

Merchant Accounts

Talking of accounts, you’ll need to get a merchant account in order to receive your ecommerce store payments. Essentially,

Payment Gateway + Merchant Account

is the complete combination that you must aim for. Merchant accounts can be obtained separately from payment gateways or in a bundle, depending upon which provider you are going for. Paypal and Stripe offer a combined experience for businesses.

Popular Ways to Collect Money Online

Debit and Credit Card Transactions

Card-based payments are the most common ways of paying online. Anyone who is not well versed with the more modern mobile wallets, can still enter their card details and quickly checkout on your website.

We recommend that you keep Debit and Credit card payments a must for your online venture. No matter how many other payment modes you provide to your customers, these two would be the most inevitable ones.

In a recent study, it was found that 75% of online buyers actually trust their debit or credit cards the most while paying. This was proved by the statistical data that shows that Visa cards accounted for 47% of online payments in 2015.

You can enable credit or debit card payments using a payment gateway. More on this in a minute.

Mobile Wallet Payments

The move from a physical wallet containing cash and cards to digital wallet apps has been exponentially fast. Just in past three years, the world has been taken by storm with the rise of digital payment apps and wallet.

64% of mobile users claimed of having some kind of mobile payment solution in their smartphones while 39% of them used a digital wallet app. These statistics prove that the adoption rate for mobile wallets is on an all-time high.

Further developments in technology that handles mobile payments has also contributed significantly. For instance, in India, the BHIM – UPI (BHarat Interface for Money – Unified Payment Interface) framework was recently launched in the wake of digital India initiative.

The technology creates virtual payment addresses for various payment avenues, that look a lot like an email address. The technology has been adopted by all major banks in India, and many wallet apps.

Therefore, if you’re ignoring wallet apps and mobile payment methods, you’re doing yourself great harm.

Email Payment Invoicing Links

Email payment invoicing is another high-traction way of collecting payments. This particular use case suits the businesses who don’t have a large customer base and need to collect payments after several interactions with the customer.

The typical users would be Freelancers and service provider agencies, who all send out payment invoices to the clients after the jobs are done. Email invoicing helps clients with the convenience of paying right from there email inbox, and in a safe environment.

The email contains a summary of the payment, with company branding, and a payment button, that takes them to the safe payment processing page. Although the payment is collected eventually from a gateway system, it resolves the initial hassles of collecting payment and gives users a personalized experience.

Subscription Based Automated Payments

Have you ever used Netflix or Amazon Prime? These services charge their customers a monthly premium, which is deducted automatically from their given mode of payment.

This unobtrusive method of collecting payments is gaining popularity. Customers don’t have to do anything once their payment details are locked in the database. This also provides a sure-shot way of keeping the customer loyal to your service.

Automated subscription processing is a part of all kinds of major payment processor platforms. Even mobile wallet apps have automated payment functionality. This means you can easily set this up if your use case is the same.

Top 5 Payment Gateway Providers

1. PayPal Payments Standard

PayPal is one of the most widely trusted names in the online payments market with 200+ supported currencies and 26 participating countries. Founded back in 1998, it became an independent company in 2015 with a net worth of more than $46 billion.

It is highly likely that customers see you in the good light if you PayPal as the payment gateway, due to its security features and refund policy. We have offered PayPal integration to majority of our clients as a part of our ecommerce website development service.

PayPal charges a nominal fee on every transaction that takes place through their gateway that depends upon the sale volume you are generating. It ranges from 3.4% to 4.4% + a fixed fee. You can find out more about it here. There are however, no charges for account setup, account termination and for getting support.

One notable thing about PayPal Standard is that the customer will be taken to PayPal’s website for completing the payment. This may or may not affect your customer-business relationship.

1. PayPal Payments Pro

If you’re more of a pro player and want an embedded payment system in your website, Payments Pro by PayPal is the thing you need.

It allows you to integrate a payment gateway in your website with your own branding and customization. It’ll also not divert customers to PayPal’s website while checkout.

To heighten the chances of successful checkouts, PayPal Credit has been built into the integration, allowing customers to buy now and pay later, while you will be paid the payment upfront without wait.

With all its benefits, this integration is costlier at 2.9% + 0.30 fee per payment and a $30 monthly fee. What’s more, it works on phone equally well.

1. Stripe

After PayPal comes Stripe, that has a fair share of popularity among ecommerce websites.

Stripe works just like PayPal but it has a striking feature that it will integrate into your website for free. You can collect payments from your customers and transfer them into your account directly, without taking them to an off-site location.

Stripe doesn’t charge a monthly fee likewise PayPal but it’s not easy as PayPal to integrate. It needs a bit of technical knowledge to make it blend well with your website. A developer will be required if you don’t know how to do it. At Dikonia, we have made several Stripe Integrations and you can contact us for to get one done.

Stripe charges the regular 2.9% + 0.30 fee per payment with no extra costs with the assurance that most major credit cards will work with Stripe.

Initially, it’ll take upto 7 days to get the funds transferred to your account but with time, you can set them to be credit on a two-day rolling basis.

1. BrainTree Payments

Brain Tree is a PayPal subsidiary that was founded in 2007 to advance the payment technology to multiple platforms.

Just like PayPal, BrainTree is an all-in-one solution to allow payments with the merchant account integrated. BrainTree comes with customizable PCI compliant web and mobile UI for creating payment forms in your website or app itself. You can also integrate BrainTree’s offered UI.

It also offers a horde of tools for developers such as the Sandbox mode and fraud protection for the buyers. You can use BrainTree to further integrate popular services like Apple Pay, Google Pay and many more.

Fees are identical to Stripe and PayPal Pro, with 2.9% + 0.30 fee per payment for small and new businesses. For established businesses, you can contact BrainTree for a quote.

Checkout BrainTree Mobile App Integration done by Dikonia.

4 Business Models to Generate Revenue from a Mobile App

Mobile Apps have given rise to the biggest businesses in the world. This is because Mobile Apps have become smart enough to tackle real-world problems and efficiently solve them. The growth and delivery of Digital Media have also benefited from business-oriented Mobile apps.

Everyone in the tech space, may it be developers or new Startups, is banking on the power of Mobile Apps to propagate their business. Sometimes, Mobile Apps serve the tools for business while other times, they’re the business themselves.

Consumers worldwide spent a total of $82 billion as reported on mobile apps in 2017. The figure is supposed to cross the $150 billion mark by 2022, which is a clear signal of profitability in this domain.

As Mobile App Development grows smarter, the business of Apps will also rise, giving a wide horizon of opportunity to innovation and constructive ideas. Only in 2017-18, we aided the deployment of three mobile app businesses as the technology partners.

But where do you get started? What is the best way to earn from a Mobile App? These questions are quite subjective. There are a number of business models that can be used for generating revenue from a Mobile App but it depends upon the use case a lot.

We have laid down the top 5 business models that would suit developers and development startups alike!

Sell Advertisement Space

In-App ads is one of the most widely used revenue models by individual developers as it is fairly successful. It works on the idea of publishing free-to-download apps that gather a large number of users over time, which establishes a sizeable advertisement space.

Once the app crosses a hundred thousand downloads, you can expect to start making a significant income by only selling ads. There is evidence that more than half mobile app users around the world click on ads, which makes this a viable option.

Only in the US, the mobile app advertising grossed over $33 billion in 2017. The availability of Ad space and smart ad placing algorithms will only increase the scope of revenue generation in this case.

Pitfalls

• In-app ads annoy users and often contribute to bad UX.
• Not all apps go well with the advertising model. If you have a utility app, the idea of ads acts counterproductively.
• Ads can slow down the performance of the app and decrease engagement.  

Freemium Apps

The next best thing that you can do while keeping the app free to download is offering Freemium apps. This is the second most popular model used by developers and companies alike. You can offer the basic functionalities free for use and encourage users to opt for advanced features for a price.

Apps like Elevate, DesignEvo and Tinder etc have been quite successful in using this business model to drive sales.

It not only lets the users to try the app without any intrusive ads, it captures their trust with the functionality of the app.

Pitfalls

• Limiting the functionalities of the free app too much can result in poor sales.
• Handing out the core functionalities for free may not generate the need to upgrade to paid features.

Hence, a striking balance between great features and lucrative premiums must be created.

Paid Download Apps

Paid download apps simply mean selling your apps for a fees to the user at the time of download. The process is mostly regulated by App stores such as Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

This model guarantees direct sales as you don’t have to lure users into buying upgrades after doing all the hard-work and each download earns a definite revenue.

There is a healthy listing of paid mobile apps that are too good to be ignored and users are comfortable paying for them. In 2017, paid mobile apps generated a revenue of $29 billion in the US alone.

Paid mobile apps often demand a high user rating, a strong focus on the app performance and marketing efforts in order to make the app really buyable.

Pitfalls

• The competition given by free apps is overwhelming for paid apps.
• Counterfeit stores offer free APK downloads for paid apps. Estimatedly, more than 90% Google Play apps have free APKs around the web.
• The costs of developing an app that is worthy of paid-app model are high to begin with.

Apps as a Service

A number of apps are designed to work as a service for the users where they can carry out real world trade or transactions. This model basically provides the apps as a platform to the users, wherein users pay for utilizing it.

The idea works really well for use cases that usually involves a large number of users. There are instances for this model in almost every app that you have on your phone.

For instance, Facebook uses advertising to generate revenue but it’s provided as a service to the users. Further, Tinder provides some paid features that enable real life convenience which directly integrates into the app.

We recently worked on a Mobile App that acts as a platform for ideators and businesses to find resources for their app ideas. It’s called Thunk and it banks on the same idea. The difference is that it’s basic usage is free.

Pitfalls

• Users may deter from the app and try to find free alternatives.
• A large and proliferating user base is required to actually run the model.

Conclusion

In an effort to make your web and mobile payment collection mechanism to be all-inclusive, you’d need to understand closely how payment processors work, and how to generate revenue using business models.

In this article, we have tried to provide exhaustive advice on all the major points that would help you make the right decision with your web venture.

If you need even more clarity on the topic, shy not to write to us or contact us today, for specific business inquiries. We help you with all kinds of web and mobile development solutions.