Which payment methods should you offer in your store? First of all, there's no best answer to this question. Looking at the payment solutions that are available worldwide, you might be surprised. There are literally hundreds of possibilities.

When speaking of payment methods, we distinguish between the following types:

The methods that you need to offer to your customers will differ from country to country. Especially if you're selling locally (within a specific country), you need to prepare your store for that market. If you're not sure which payment methods you should offer, just look at the methods other online stores in your market are offering. Here are some, possibilities, but be aware that the list below only cover the most important, widely used payment possibilities:

This list explains something about the payment methods, but not about the Payment Provider yet. A payment provider allows the online store to accept payments in different forms and will authorize the transactions. Often they also provide an online tool to manage your funds. Just to mention some of the major players:

It's important to understand the difference between a Payment Provider and a Payment Gateway. The Payment Provider is the company used to offer one or multiple Payment methods, which are in WooCommerce referred to as Payment Gateways. For example, PayPal is a Payment Provider, offering Payment Gateways like PayPal Pro, PayPal Express Checkout and PayPal Digital Goods. Often, a Payment Provider offers multiple Payment methods.

For your store it's likely that you need to offer a combination of payment possibilities. Let's first have a look at what WooCommerce has to offer by default. Navigate to WooCommerce | Settings | Checkout.

The Checkout Options were already discussed in Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce. Note that next to the screen with options, we can see the following payment methods:

In fact, the methods mentioned above are offline payment methods, except for PayPal and Simplify Commerce. PayPal is widely accepted. Simplify Commerce is at moment of writing only available for the USA and Ireland.

An offline payment method means that your customer can use that method if you offer it, but the actual payment is not carried out immediately. You'll have to manually check later on if you received the money from your customer. The offline method requires that your customer makes sure the payment is done. Online payment methods immediately do the payment transaction online, at the moment of sale. In most cases the payment is verified automatically and the order status in WooCommerce will be updated accordingly.

When you want to accept credit cards in your store, you'll soon hear something about PCI compliancy. The issue is: if you let your customers enter their credit card details directly on your website, you must be PCI compliant. The downside is that getting your website PCI compliant is difficult to reach.

If you'd like to know more about this subject, the following website may be useful: http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/.

So, how are we going to solve this? We still need to be able to accept credit cards in our store. Luckily, this is where the Payment Service Providers jump in. These are third-party companies handling the payment transactions for you in a secure way. Simplify Commerce that we just mentioned, is just one of the many options you have. However, your country of residence will influence the number of possibilities you can choose from.

Just by checking out the WooCommerce extensions page, you'll get an idea of what's possible for your market: http://www.woothemes.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/.

Select Payment Gateways and your country to receive an overview of available, payment extensions for WooCommerce:

The extensions to support Payment Service Providers aren't free at the WooThemes website. Sometimes the Payment Service Provider of your choice might offer a free extension for WooCommerce when you sign up. Just make sure that you check if it is available. Installing an extension works in the same way as with any regular WordPress plugin. After installing the plugin there's always some configuration that needs to be done. The steps you need to take differ per Payment Gateway.

The extensions at the WooThemes website can sometimes be pricey. But you will receive support and updates for a year, which can be a good reason still to choose for a WooThemes plugin. Alternatively, there are lots of WooCommerce compatible extensions offered at the CodeCanyon website: http://codecanyon.net/category/wordpress/ecommerce/woocommerce. The quality of these plugins may differ, so please pay attention to the ratings and comments of other users.

It's wise to take some time to find the right Payment Service Provider for your market. Pay attention to the rates charged by the Payment Service Provider (as well transaction fees as monthly rates) and the way they will pay you after the transaction.

Setting up a contract with a Payment Service Provider of your choice and the way the setup is done in WooCommerce differs a lot. Therefore, in our example below, we've chosen to just stick to the default options of WooCommerce.

Setting up PayPal in your WooCommerce store is very simple. Of course you first need to create a PayPal account if you do not yet have one at http://www.paypal.com. Mark it as a business account and enter your bank account details to be able to transfer money from your PayPal account to your regular bank account.

Next, in WooCommerce, click PayPal at the top of the Payment Gateways tab

Enter the e-mail address that you used to create your PayPal account:

Note that you have the following possibilities:

Stripe is a payment method created for software developers. Meanwhile the service became more mature and is now available in more than 20 countries, among which the USA, Australia, and a part of Western Europe.

To be able to use Stripe, your website must use a SSL certificate. Without it, you cannot use Stripe in a production environment. If you'd like to receive more information on SSL: your hosting provider can help you. A good option could be Namecheap (https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates.aspx), which has a pretty good acceptance and is very affordable. Even better, but also more expensive is Digicert (https://www.digicert.com/buy-ssl-certificates.htm). Note that Digicert also offers a lot of information on using SSL certificates.

After signing up for a Stripe account (http://stripe.com), you just have to confirm your e-mail address to get started. For WooCommerce, there are a couple of options. There's a plugin available at WooThemeshere: http://www.woothemes.com/products/stripe/.

There's also a free extension available through the WordPress.org website (https://wordpress.org/plugins/stripe-for-woocommerce/). And that's the one we'll be using in our example below:

That's all you need to setup a working solution to accept credit cards on your website. The exact procedure for other payment gateways will differ, but generally the steps will look similar.

For the other, offline Payment Methods, it's just a matter of enabling or disabling them as you please. You are able to change the description that your visitors will see for every payment method. The Cash on Delivery payment method also gives the possibility to connect it to a shipping method. That's useful so you'll be able to set a different price for using this method, since Cash on Delivery is often an expensive choice.