If you’re like many business owners using Woocommerce to power their ecommerce stores, I am sure you’ve experienced the flood of payment gateways, and merchant service options out there. In this article, we’ll give you our top 5 payment processing/payment gateway plugins based on user feedback, feature support, fee rates, customer service and reliability.
Table of Contents:
- PayPal
- Square
- Stripe
- PayHawk
#4: PayPal
PayPal has become an increasingly popular choice for small business owners. The common use case at the moment for many is the simplicity of setting up an account and making money. PayPal is #5 on our list here because while it offers a quick approach to setting up an account and quick configuration settings, its fees can be astronomical. The fees at the time of writing (3/17/2023) is 3.49% + fixed fee ($0.10 USD).
PayPal also does not offer the best support for the Woocommerce side of things with many users reporting that support has told them to speak with a developer or to contact Woocommerce about issues (which would make sense as Woocommerce is the primary developer of this plugin).
⭐⭐
(2 star user rating)
#3: Square
Square is a very popular choice for businesses of all sizes and the reasoning behind this is that Square is a well known trusted brand similar to that of Authorize.net, however, it does offer far more than Authorize and a direct comparison would be nearly impossible.
What does square do right?
First, square offers several packages that are perfect for niche few, and also offers more standard packages that work with any business type.
Square does have a shortcoming that turns many away, well two actually.
First, the support is not the best and could be better. Many negative reviews indicate that the support isn’t helpful or likes to direct you to a wiki before offering advice.
The next downside to Square is their pricing.
With Square, the rates are upfront and transparent which we like, but we didn’t like to see a subscription model on top of a payment processing fee.
The other thing we really disliked that left a sour taste in our mouths (and many of users) is the different processing fees that you could face, depending on your situation – if you plan to sell online you’ll notice a fee schedule of 2.9% + 30 cents or if you opt to manually enter in the information on your customers behalf you’ll see a fee schedule of 2.9% + 15 cents. What we really don’t like is the fact that you actually get charged more to use their virtual system which compared to their traditional card present, onsite, etc approach it’s only 2.6% + 10 cents… WHY?
So, why did we choose to place Square higher than Authorize if it has such a bad rating? The simple reason is because Square (beyond just ecommerce) has a lot to offer many businesses, and that the Woocommerce plugin is actually free unlike many other gateways.
⭐⭐⭐
(3 star user rating)
#2: Stripe
Stripe is a developers haven when it comes to a consistent and well rounded payment gateway. Stripe is perfect for those that are comfortable getting their hands into code. Stripe also is great for businesses that don’t want to get into the weeds with code, as it integrates well with several well known WordPress plugins, including its own standard Woocommerce plugin.
According to users, Stripe is a great choice for them and very little bad was to be said about them other than the support, which seems to be a common trend in this comparison. Though, to Stripe’s defense, it doesn’t advertise itself as a friendly-install solution, it takes a developers approach and offers deep and insightful documentation.
Stripe also has similar features to that of Square, but falls short on its overall feature list. With Stripe you can process payments, send invoices and more.
The downside of Stripe is their fee schedules, which range dramatically depending on the unique application, however, we did find the general rate for ecommerce + WordPress was 2.9% + 30 cents for an integrated system it also has extra fees such as +0.5% for manually entered cards, +1.5% for international cards and +1% if currency conversion is required.
Overall, Stripe is a great option for developers, and for those looking for an easy integration into their current WordPress website.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
(4 star user rating)
#1: PayHawk
Last but not least we have ourselves, PayHawk! First, let’s start off with a summary as to who PayHawk is perfect for: PayHawk is perfect for any small, medium or large business that wants to have more than just a payment gateway. PayHawk is a merchant services provider that focuses on providing quality customer service while offering the lowest rates around.
PayHawk is an excellent choice for those looking for a complete end to end solution with flexibility in mind. PayHawk can be integrated with Woocommerce in a few ways: #1. Using a partner provided plugin or #2 using our HTML based-code with a robust API to handle unique fields and properties.
The bad?
Well, there really isn’t any! We’re transparent and always upfront about our pricing and require no contracts or long term commitments, we’re 100% dedicated to you, and your financial success.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
(5 star Google rating)
