SaaS Billing Platforms: Which gateways should you support?

Spreedly is focused on two markets:

i) Direct merchants and FinTech startups that love using the vault and working with a handful of gateways.

ii) SaaS based services that include allowing their customers to do billing online - primarily via credit cards.

If you're in the second group you know how important it is to support a diverse customer base and their existing gateways if you want to maximize market reach/traction. 

We provide support for over one hundred and twenty different gateways. However not all of our customers in the second group wish to start out supporting all fifty. Thus we are often asked "What are the most important gateways for me to support at launch?" 

We pulled some of our data to help make this decision. This list is probably most beneficial for English speaking SMB focused SaaS solutions.

First Data Source:

The Payment Gateway Index is something we jointly launched with Shopify's help (you can
if you're interested). It's focused on that murkiest of areas; credit card decline rates. For our purposes here we focused solely on web visitor traffic data as a proxy for market interest in gateways. Here's a list of the top 10 gateway's that visitors to the gateway index drill down on:

The next source of data is Spreedly's own technical documentation. We have an individual page for each gateway we support. Here are the ten most popular pages over the last few months.

For our third and final data point we looked at our production data for the year (since March when we launched into production). Given the time it takes for people to implement you would expect this data to trail the other data a little so keep that in mind.

Finally, we added in anecdotal information to come up with our final "must have" list. This data included newer gateways that are attracting a lot of interest. We also bumped down a little gateways that we know are difficult to work with and/or have poor support. We've seen first hand the amount of time lost for one customer on a problematic gateway. 

So here is our Top 10 list for launching an English speaking SaaS service targeting SMB customer's who will process credit card transactions within your service.

1. PayPal

2. Braintree

3. Stripe

4. Authorize.Net

5. SagePay

6. PayMill

7. WorldPay

8. DPS/Payment Express

9. Pin Payments

10. Wirecard

An honorable mention is due Balancedpayments.com and eWay. 

I hope that helps. We'll revisit periodically to see if there are substantial changes.

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Download the Multiple Payment Gateways eBook Below