Increasingly, more of our clients are looking towards collecting payment online. To facilitate such payments, we need to integrate your website to a payment gateway.
It all depends on 2 important questions:

• What is your targetted market?
• What is your budget?

This article seeks to explore the difference between 3 of the most common payment gateways used in Singapore, namely eNets, PayPal, WorldPay.

TARGETTED MARKET

Your targeted market will largely determine the type of gateway you choose. Different gateways have different levels of reputation (some consumers remain highly skeptical about the security of internet transactions can be) with consumers in different locality. For consumers based in Singapore, eNets is pretty well known. However, if it is a Global Market you are looking at, eNets is definitely not as popular as PayPal and WorldPay.

Beside reputation, another important factor is the type of currency the payment gateway supports. PayPal currently only supports 5 types of currency: USD, CAD, AUD, EUR, GBP and JPY. Consumers in Singapore will generally prefer to pay in SGD. This makes PayPal slightly inconvenient. Both eNets and WorldPay support payments in SGD. If you are serious in targeting you should get either a eNets and WorldPay account.

BUDGET

PayPal are most transparent with their rates. They generally charge 2.9% of your transaction size + an additional 0.30 USD levee for low volume transactions. No setup fee is charged for setting up a PayPal account. For a better understanding of PayPal rates, click here.

eNets and WorldPay are more secretive about their rates. But anyway, a simple call to their sales office in Singapore will reveal that eNets charges 200 SGD (one time setup fee) and an annual 450 SGD (recurring fee). WorldPay on the other hand charges 250 SGD (one time setup fee) and an annual 600 SGD (recurring fee). Both gateways start with a transaction levee of 4.5% of transaction costs. Notice the word “start with”? Well, what happens is if your transaction volume is high, you can generally negotiate for better rates… but of course… those rates are once again… kept in secret…

CONCLUSION

For the budget conscious consumer, we will advise them to go with PayPal. However if you need to target the local market, eNets will be a better choice. So what happens if you need to target both the overseas and local market? eNets is generally sufficient to do the trick as it accepts credit card payments. However, as Paypal is generally more recognised internationally, we suggest you provide PayPal as an alternative payment option.

WorldPay is excellent for consumers that want the convenience of managing just one reputable account. Tradeoff: at a higher price.