Hosted Payment Page: the Simple and Secure Checkout Tool

Every business strives to ensure a seamless payment process for its customers. While this puzzle has many pieces, one of its critical elements is a smooth online checkout procedure. It can be achieved in different ways, yet one of the best options is to implement a hosted payment page.

Read this overview to find out what makes this checkout method stand out among other tools used to accept payments and why it could be a game-changer for your web store.

What Is a Hosted Payment Page?

A hosted payment page is a common method of facilitating online purchases. It’s an outsourced checkout form that handles transactions initiated by debit and credit cards and other electronic payment methods. You may also hear it being called External Checkout, External Payment Page, or Third-Party Checkout.

For a fairly small transaction fee, this service will take care of the following steps of the payment process:

• Collecting the information on the transaction initiated by card or another payment method
• Protecting sensitive data of the customer
• Ensuring the online transaction’s security

External Payment Page Operation Principle

The way a hosted payment page works is rather straightforward:

1. The customer decides to obtain products or services on your website and proceeds to checkout.
2. Next, the consumer gets redirected to a hosted payment page instantly and seamlessly.
3. After that, the client fills up the online payment form with the required information and finalizes the transaction.

As you can see, the customers’ payment data never passes through a merchant’s site directly, which is one of the many advantages of implementing external checkout - more on this below.

Benefits of Hosted Payment Pages for Business Operations

A hosted payment page is the perfect way to add functionality to an existing ecommerce website.

Here are the advantages that would follow such an upgrade:

Easy Website Integration

An external payment page is an excellent solution for companies operating at a small or medium scale and is among the fastest and most secure ways to start accepting purchases from customers.

Integrating this tool into your business doesn’t require advanced technical knowledge and is typically limited to pasting a line of code.

Simplified PCI DSS Compliance

Processing transactions exclusively by means of a hosted payment page usually lightens the requirements set by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

With third-party checkout, complying with these card payment security guidelines implies only filling up a Self-Assessment Questionnaire.

Security of Payments

In terms of data security and transaction safety, a hosted payment page is hardly rivaled. Besides, it gives the merchant peace of mind since they basically outsource the protection of the customers’ sensitive data from a company that specializes in it.

Such an approach is diametrically opposed to performing the checkout process on your website when you have to take care of managing, transmitting, and protecting the payment information of every customer.

Thus, working with a hosted payment page takes the responsibility for fraudulent incidents and hacking off the sellers’ shoulders and helps them avoid financial losses.

How to Choose a Provider of Hosted Payment Pages for Your Website?

Finding the right provider to ensure a secure process of accepting payments can be tricky.

Here are some crucial factors you will need to keep in mind when choosing a hosted payment page service:

• Customization potential. A great checkout page solution for payments hosted by a third-party service should be customizable to fit your branding. It’s all about keeping the process seamless, so the more the payment page feels like your actual website, the better.
• Ease of integration. The setup process of a hosted payment page mustn’t be complicated and take a lot of your resources. Search for a provider that keeps the integration simple and straightforward.
• Payment methods selection. It is most likely that the majority of your customers will opt for card payments. However, the merchant’s ultimate goal is to facilitate the purchase for as many clients as possible. Thus, ensure that the hosted checkout page provider you select supports various payment methods.
• Scale of reach. As a business owner, you are probably planning to expand your store’s scale of operation at some point. For that purpose, double-check if the hosted payment page you are planning to choose can accept international payments in a local currency.

Is a Hosted Payment Page Essential for a Business?

While hosted payment pages aren’t mandatory for businesses, they certainly do carry plenty of benefits. From enhancing the security of your payments and protecting merchants from unnecessary risks to providing the customers with a frictionless checkout process, this tool well-deserves its global popularity.