How to Choose the Right WooCommerce Payment Gateway

Choosing a payment gateway for a WooCommerce store can feel like one of those jobs you’ll get around to eventually. Stripe? PayPal? Bank transfer? Pay on Account? Maybe all of them?

But your payment setup is about much more than simply getting a customer’s money from A to B. The right setup can make checkout easier, reduce admin, automate accounting and dramatically improve how your business handles orders after the sale.

The wrong one can leave you manually matching payments to orders at 11pm.

We’ve built enough WooCommerce stores to know which side of that equation we’d rather be on…

What is a WooCommerce payment gateway?

A payment gateway is the bit of technology that connects your WooCommerce checkout to a payment provider.

The customer places an order, the gateway handles the payment and WooCommerce receives confirmation of what happened.

There are several types of gateway, including online card payments, digital wallets, alternative payment methods and offline options such as bank transfer. WooCommerce itself supports a wide range of payment gateway approaches.

The important thing is that you don’t necessarily need to choose just one.

For many businesses, the best WooCommerce checkout might offer Stripe alongside PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and perhaps Pay on Account for approved trade customers.

The trick is working out what makes sense for your customers and your business.

A massive 4million+ online stores are built with Woo!

[SOURCE]

Stripe: the obvious starting point

Stripe is often our go-to for WooCommerce stores because it’s flexible, well supported and integrates neatly into the checkout experience.

The official WooCommerce Stripe extension supports cards, express payment methods such as Apple Pay, local payment methods and various buy-now-pay-later options, depending on eligibility and market.

That’s useful because customers increasingly expect to be able to pay how they want, rather than being forced through one particular payment method.

Stripe can also securely save payment methods for returning customers, making repeat purchases quicker.

Stripe is particularly good for:

• Standard B2C ecommerce
• Credit and debit card payments
• Apple Pay and other express checkout methods
• International sales
• Subscription businesses
• Stores wanting a relatively slick checkout experience
• Businesses that want payment data and transaction management in Stripe

And there are plenty of additional payment methods available if your audience needs them.

One important point: don’t add every available payment method just because you can. More isn’t automatically better. A checkout should be useful, not look like the departures board at Heathrow.

PayPal: still very much alive

PayPal has been around for what feels like approximately 400 years in internet time, but there’s a reason customers still use it.

The current WooCommerce PayPal Payments extension supports PayPal alongside options including advanced card payments, Pay Later and various local payment methods, depending on market.

For some customers, the appeal is simple: they already have a PayPal account and don’t want to type their card details into yet another website.

For international stores, PayPal can also provide another familiar payment option for customers who may not be comfortable using your primary gateway.

PayPal can make sense when:

• Your customers already expect PayPal
• You’re selling internationally
• You’re targeting consumers who prefer wallet-based payments
• You want PayPal alongside Stripe rather than instead of it

And there’s no rule saying Stripe and PayPal can’t live happily together.

In fact, for many stores, they shouldn’t be an either/or decision.

What about Pay on Account?

This is where things get interesting.

If you’re selling B2B, trade or wholesale, your customers may not want to pull out a credit card every time they order.

They might expect to:

Place order → receive goods → receive invoice → pay later.

That’s Pay on Account.

WooCommerce supports offline payment methods such as bank transfer, while dedicated extensions can provide more sophisticated “pay later” or invoice workflows.

The important distinction is that Pay on Account isn’t simply another payment gateway.

It’s a business process.

You need to think about:

• Who is allowed to use it?
• Are they credit checked?
• What payment terms do they have?
• Do they have a credit limit?
• Who receives the invoice?
• When is the invoice created?
• How are overdue invoices handled?
• How does your accounts team know what has been ordered?
• How does the customer know what they owe?

For a B2B WooCommerce store, getting those answers right can be considerably more valuable than shaving a few milliseconds off the checkout.

The really interesting bit: connect WooCommerce to your accounts system

This is where a well-built WooCommerce site can become much more than an online shop.

Imagine this:

Customer places order
↓
WooCommerce creates the order
↓
Payment is processed
↓
Order information is sent to your accounting system
↓
Invoice is created automatically
↓
Payment is reconciled
↓
Your accounts team can go pop the kettle on

That’s considerably better than downloading a CSV every Friday and spending three hours matching transactions.

Xero + WooCommerce

For example, the official Xero for WooCommerce extension can create invoices in Xero for WooCommerce sales and send information including products, shipping, discounts and tax.

It can also be configured around when invoices and payments are sent to Xero, depending on the workflow you need.

For larger or more complex stores, there are also dedicated integrations which can synchronise orders, payments, customers, products, inventory and other information between WooCommerce and Xero.

That’s a completely different proposition to simply adding a card machine to your website.

Think about the whole workflow, not just checkout

One of the biggest mistakes we see is choosing a payment gateway based purely on:

“How much does it cost per transaction?”

That’s important, obviously.

But imagine Gateway A costs slightly less per transaction but requires your accounts team to manually reconcile every order.

Gateway B costs a little more but automatically feeds the information into Xero and reduces several hours of admin every week.

Suddenly the cheapest payment gateway isn’t necessarily the cheapest solution.

When we’re building a WooCommerce store, we like to map the entire journey:

Product → basket → checkout → payment → order → fulfilment → invoice → accounting → reporting

Because that’s where the real efficiencies are hiding.

Don’t forget subscriptions

If your business sells recurring products or services, payment gateway choice becomes even more important.

Think:

• Monthly subscription boxes
• Memberships
• Software
• Maintenance plans
• Regular deliveries
• Donations

WooCommerce Subscriptions can handle recurring payments, but your chosen payment gateway needs to support the subscription workflow you require.

Stripe and PayPal Payments both have WooCommerce integrations that support subscription-related functionality, although exactly what is available depends on the payment method and configuration.

This is another reason to think about the business model first and the plugin second.

International ecommerce changes the equation

Selling outside the UK? No problem.

Currency, local payment methods, wallets, tax and settlement currencies can all become considerations.

For example, WooCommerce’s Stripe integration supports local payment methods and offers Adaptive Pricing for eligible merchants, allowing international customers to see and pay in their preferred currency while the merchant receives payouts according to Stripe’s supported configuration.

Don’t assume that because a gateway works perfectly for a UK checkout it’ll automatically be the best solution for a Dutch, German or Japanese customer.

Your customers’ preferred payment methods matter.

Security matters. Obviously.

Payment isn’t the part of a WooCommerce build where we’d recommend getting creative.

While we usually recommend keeping plugin use to an essential minimum, payment gateways are the exception. Official payment gateways are secure, robust and thoroughly tested in the real world by real businesses. Most work out of the box with little configuration. Let them do the heavy lifting.

31% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites use WooCommerce so you’re in good company!

[SOURCE]

Use established payment providers and maintained integrations. Keep WordPress, WooCommerce and payment extensions up to date. Make sure your site uses HTTPS.

For example, WooCommerce’s Stripe documentation requires an SSL certificate and a recent WordPress/WooCommerce environment.

There are also different technical types of gateway. Some redirect customers to the payment provider, some use embedded payment interfaces and others process payment fields directly on the site. The architecture affects your security and compliance responsibilities.

In other words: don’t bolt a random payment plugin onto a live shop because it has five stars and 400 downloads.

So, which WooCommerce payment gateway should you choose?

There’s no universal winner.

And these are starting points, not rules.

The right combination depends on your customers, average order value, geography, payment terms, products and internal processes.

The best payment gateway is the one you barely notice

That’s probably the biggest lesson.

A good payment system shouldn’t become the star of the show. Customers should be able to pay quickly and confidently, orders should appear correctly in WooCommerce, payments should reconcile, invoices should get where they’re supposed to go and your team shouldn’t spend half a day moving numbers between spreadsheets.

WooCommerce isn’t just your shop window. Done properly, it can become the front end of your entire sales operation.

And that’s the bit we love building at DCOED.

Looking for an experienced WooCommerce developer to build your local business online store? Come say hi.

No unnecessary complexity. No plugin soup. Just the right combination of WooCommerce, payment processing and third-party integrations to make the whole thing work properly. Lovely.