Top Considerations for International Payments

International eCommerce has the practical ability to manage payments using multiple payment providers among geographic territories. Therefore, the served locations need separate bank accounts for receiving payments, along with adapted processing so that everything is localized and familiar for each particular region. This could also apply to a different company department or part of the organization that represents a certain region where the payment provider will be utilized.

As an example, let's assume a US-based company would like to expand and start selling internationally in Europe, Australia and Asia. Each of these different locations have their respective currencies, laws and specific requirements for setting up a business; those include complying with customs, duties, taxes and all of the nuances of processing payments. The entirety of those aspects must be taken into consideration for successful implementation.

In addition, the way an account has to be set up may vary, depending on the type of payments that will be received, or the nature of the products sold. A lot of details can go into properly setting up a payment provider so that it can efficiently handle payment processing for these international locations. Careful planning is therefore a vital component of incorporating the optimal payment management solution for your international eCommerce.

Selecting a Payment Provider for International eCommerce

When evaluating payment providers, consider the distinctive needs of your business or organization. Perhaps you have a scenario where you require more complicated payment options than just a traditional credit or debit card payment. You may want to do ACH payments, accept digital payments, process checks, or possibly even handle purchase orders and advance invoice management. All of those scenarios might call for a degree of customization and optimization, to ensure the end user has a very seamless customer experience while staying well informed during the process.

Needless to say, we recommend assessing your international eCommerce provider and making sure they're prepared to administer these global configurations. They must be able to implement all custom settings correctly for each combination of country or region and payment provider. Last but not least, your business logic needs to adapt accordingly on top of the fundamental capability to implement core functionality. This will help you achieve a flawless result that enhances your international eCommerce presence.

Another possibility to keep in mind is how some payment providers may not support specific regions. You might be already collaborating with a payment provider that simply doesn't offer services to a particular region, or they require another version of their API in order to successfully interact with the other location. As it turns out, this can be quite common for really large and established payment providers. One of the challenges of becoming highly streamlined within the international eCommerce space, is understanding and being able to adapt to these required APIs that vary depending on the region.

So once again, we strongly encourage you to investigate the different locations that you contemplate entering and deeply understand their needs. Consider the characteristics of the countries or regions and your planned timing for going into them. Then assess and analyze the capabilities of your global eCommerce solution in terms of handling payments for those different countries and locations. This process will reveal the most appropriate solutions that perfectly match your international eCommerce and help you implement them accordingly.

Advanced Payment Management for Different Locations or Segments

The payment provider is an influencing factor for the international eCommerce operation, as it dictates whether or not you can process payments digitally and in what form. Another important aspect to review is if your payment provider(s) can process payments for ACH, do refunds and subscriptions or support subscription renewals. Maybe you wish the system to handle complex transactions where you verify the physical order is fulfilled and delivered, as part of a customer service value add that happens before the payment actually gets sent to the seller.

Overall nuances within the process should be examined to ascertain the international eCommerce functionality is compatible with your business model. Keep in mind that not all of your necessary capabilities will be available by certain payment providers. We would therefore encourage you not only to look at the eCommerce platform and its abilities, but also inspect payment providers and their offerings.

One possible solution would be to enable multiple payment providers so that they’re allocated dynamically to match the requirements for each particular region, currency or language. This is something that we commonly implement for international eCommerce and marketplaces as well, since most international marketplaces typically have this specification. The general idea is that the eCommerce platform itself needs to be capable of handling basic business logic, so that whenever different regions are supported, they can all employ their own payment processor.

You may even have locations within those regions, or states within those countries, that you want to divvy up into different payment providers as well. The optimal approach ultimately depends on the individual situation for your business and how you're operating within different geographic areas. The key question is: are you aware of the capabilities and limitations of your international eCommerce platform? This will help you select a system that has the long-term capabilities that you'll be looking for based on the projected growth of your business.

Clarity International eCommerce Experts

There certainly is a lot more to international eCommerce than just the payment providers, but payment management can be an Achilles heel if it's not validated beforehand. We encourage you to continue reading the articles below, which provide additional information about this topic and many others relating to international eCommerce. Please feel free to reach out to our team of knowledgeable and friendly experts who would be glad to provide you with further assistance or elaboration.