Choosing a payment solution for your online store

Launching an online store, most of the attention goes to design, product photography and ad budget. Payments get left for last, on the assumption that any button that "accepts cards" is good enough. The decision then gets made in one evening, based on the single most visible number: the commission rate.

The problem is that commission alone does not show the real cost to your store or the real experience of your buyer. Settlement time shapes your cash flow, the refund process eats your team's hours per case, and 3D Secure decides how many payments fail at the last step. This piece asks those questions before the contract, not after.

Commission: the percentage alone tells you nothing

Almost every payment provider earns money one of three ways: a percentage of the transaction, a flat per-transaction fee, or a mix of both. Some add a monthly subscription or a minimum-turnover requirement on top. The headline number can mislead on its own — a low percentage paired with a high flat fee changes the real cost sharply on small orders (say, a 15-20 AZN order).

The right question is not "what's the rate" but "what does this cost given my average order value and expected monthly transaction count." Do not sign until you have run that math across three different volume scenarios, not just the one the sales rep quoted.

Add one more question to your list: is there a separate fee for a lost dispute, and does a refund also return the commission the provider already took on that transaction? Some providers charge a flat penalty on top of a lost chargeback, others simply keep the commission on any refunded order. Each of these looks small on its own, but added up over a year they can outweigh the headline commission rate itself.

Settlement time: how many days before the money is actually yours

When a customer pays by card, the money does not land in your account instantly — the provider holds it and transfers it on an agreed schedule, anywhere from one day to several business days. On paper that looks like a minor detail, but if you are restocking or paying a supplier out of working capital, every extra day is a day part of your capital is effectively lent to someone else.

Ask the question in exact terms: is the payout on a T+1 schedule or T+5? How do holidays and weekends affect it? The answer belongs in the contract in writing, not in a verbal promise on a sales call.

Refunds and disputes: when a customer wants their money back

Every online store handles refunds — the wrong size, a late delivery, a simple change of mind. The question is whether a refund is one click in your dashboard or a support ticket you wait on, and how quickly the money actually reaches the customer.

The harder case is a dispute the cardholder raises directly with their bank. There, the burden of proof sits with the merchant: order records, delivery confirmation, message history. Ask in advance whether the solution you are choosing makes it easy to gather and submit that evidence — finding out on the day a dispute opens is too late.

3D Secure: the balance between security and speed

3D Secure is the extra layer where the cardholder's own bank confirms the transaction. The current standard, EMV 3-D Secure (3DS2), runs on a risk-based model with two flows: low-risk transactions pass through frictionless, with no extra step, while higher-risk ones get routed to a challenge — a one-time code, biometrics, or another check.

What that means for your store: a well-configured 3DS2 setup both cuts fraud and lets most customers through without friction. A poorly configured or outdated setup pushes nearly every transaction into the challenge flow instead, and the result is an abandoned cart. The question to ask a provider: what share of transactions go frictionless, and which 3DS version does it support.

Integration and support: who answers when something breaks

How a payment solution connects to your site is also a cost — just measured in time, not currency. A ready-made plugin from your platform's own app store can be live in a couple of hours. A custom API integration can stretch to days or weeks, depending on how good the documentation is. Your platform — an off-the-shelf storefront engine or a site built from scratch — narrows the choice before you even compare providers, because not every solution connects equally easily to every platform.

Then there's support. When payments stop working — on a holiday, at 2am — who do you contact, and how long do you wait? Some providers offer live chat, others only a ticket queue. The answer to that question is rarely in the contract; it usually sits in fine print ("during business hours") and gets discovered mid-outage instead of before signing.

Worth asking in addition:

• Is there a sandbox environment, or do you have to test on the live site?
• Does the dashboard show a log and error code for a failed transaction, or do you have to file a support request to find out?
• If you ever need to accept a foreign-currency card, who sets the conversion rate?

Mobile experience: every extra field in the checkout form is a lost sale

According to Baymard Institute's research on cart abandonment, 19% of people who abandon a cart don't trust the site with their card details, 9% say there weren't enough payment methods, and 17% call the checkout too long or complicated. Those numbers usually get worse on mobile, not better — every extra field, every redirect, every slow-loading step compounds the same problem on a small screen.

Test this yourself: run a purchase from your own phone. How many pages does it redirect through? Do you have to type the card number by hand, or does the device autofill it? When a payment fails, what does the error say — something specific, or just "an error occurred"?

The most expensive payment method for an online store is never the one you picked — it's the one the customer abandoned at the last step.

None of these questions should get asked after the contract is signed. Commission, settlement time, the refund process, the 3D Secure setup, integration terms and the mobile experience all deserve a written answer before the deal, not a line in a sales deck.

If checking all of this yourself sounds like a lot, our web store development service works through exactly these decisions with you — from payment integration to delivery logic.