Payment Gateway Provider — Online Payment Processing Tips And Pitfalls | TBS #140

I recently did a launch with an agency client for a free plus shipping offer that resulted in a bit more than $7,000 in a four day period.

It was an incredible offer with two one-click upsells.

My client was using Authorize.net as the payment gateway. And we used ClickFunnels.com along with Infusionsoft.com to manage our landing pages, checkout pages, invoices and transactions.

We started strong on day one with around $3,000.

Around 130 orders came in within a very short amount of time. However, on day two we didn’t seem to get any orders.

I started to get worried that my sales copy didn’t convert so well.

Our conversion rate dropped from around 8% to 5% in one day. For the whole day we didn’t make any additional sales while the traffic volume to the sales page was growing and growing. Around one thousand visitors saw the sales page on that second day.

And then it finally dawned on me that Authorize.net had shut down our account. So we called them and they confirmed that they had disabled our account without even informing us about it.

The reason was that we were generating too many sales in a short amount of time. So their fraud detection system raised red flags.

Authorize.net punished us for good marketing and salesmanship.

They unlocked our account and we sent the second launch email and started driving traffic again. Sales came in again like crazy and everything was fine. Then, around 24 hours later, sales staled.

Again, I instantly knew it had to do with our gateway.

So we called Authorize.net again and they had shut down our account again. For the exact same reasons: Too many transactions.

Now if this happens once, and you confirm with the gateway that everything is fine, this isn’t a big issue. It was our mistake because we didn’t inform the payment gateway about our product launch.

But if it happens twice within a four day period, while having confirmed per phone, is now simply harming our business.

Also we had a ton of rejected transactions due to international credit card payments. Our target audience were French women, so most of our sales came from France but our business is set up in the US.

Bottom line: Your payment gateway matters!

Pick it carefully, research them, test their customer support and see how responsive and reliable they are, inform them about bigger launches and build a relationship with them over time.

Personally, I will never use Authorize.net in my own business.

And I would never use 2Checkout and others either.

My favorite payment gateway so far is Stripe.com. Maybe this will change in the future, but up until now, they have exceeded my expectations and have proven to be a breeze to work with.

Their customer support is awesome and personal, they get back to my emails within 24 hours consistently and they care about me.

Also I’ve done launches with Stripe that generated thousands of transactions within a five day period and resulted in $35,000. They never shut down our account or blocked our flow of sales. Also we had a lot less bounced international credit card transactions.