A customer in Rotterdam has filled her basket on your site. Sixty-two euros, two items, she is ready. At the checkout there is one option: pay by bank transfer, we ship once the money arrives. She closes the tab and buys the same thing somewhere else within four minutes.

Nothing was broken. The shop loaded, the price was fair, the photos were good. She simply did not want to open her banking app, copy a reference number and then wait two days for a parcel.

Payment methods are one of the few things on a website where a small change has an immediate, countable effect. Here is how to choose them without turning your checkout into a wall of logos.

Start from how your customers already pay

Paying is a habit, not a decision. People reach for whatever they used last week, and if it is not there they hesitate. Hesitation at the last step is expensive.

Those habits are local. In the Netherlands almost everyone pays online with iDEAL. In Belgium it is Bancontact. In France the bank card is the default. In Germany a surprising number of people still expect to pay after delivery. In Morocco, Egypt and much of the Gulf, cash on delivery is still completely normal for a first order, alongside cards and local wallets.

So the question is not "which methods exist", it is "which two or three habits do my actual customers have". Open your last fifty orders or enquiries and look at the countries. If nine out of ten come from one country, you need that country's habit working flawlessly and one fallback for everyone else. You do not need eight buttons.

Every method costs you three things, not one

Most owners compare the transaction fee and stop there. The fee is real — usually a small fixed amount plus a percentage of the order — but it is only the first of three costs.

The second is the money you never collect. Payments that fail halfway and are never retried. Baskets abandoned because the only option felt awkward. With cash on delivery, parcels refused at the door.

The third is admin. Someone matching bank transfers to orders every morning. Refunds done by hand. Cash that has to be counted and banked.

Bank transfer looks free and is not: it costs you a day or two of delay and a daily reconciliation job. Cash on delivery looks friendly, and it is, right up to the moment a parcel comes back. Then you have paid shipping twice, the item has been out of stock for two weeks, and you never had the money.

Three methods is usually enough

One default local method that your main market uses without thinking. It should be the first option, pre-selected, and it should work flawlessly on a phone.

One card option, for visitors from elsewhere, for business customers, and for the orders you take by phone or e-mail.

One method for the hesitant — a wallet such as PayPal, or cash on delivery if that is the norm in your market. This is the one that converts a first-time buyer who does not know you yet.

A fourth and a fifth rarely bring extra orders; they make the page longer and your bookkeeping wider. In our experience, more choice at the moment of paying makes people slower, not more certain.

One term worth knowing: a payment service provider is the company that plugs all of these methods into your site under one contract and pays you out in one lump. You almost never arrange each method separately.

For bookings, ask for a deposit — not the full amount

A restaurant table, a garage slot, a consultation: the problem is rarely payment, it is the no-show. Asking for the whole amount up front scares people off. Asking for nothing means an empty chair on a Saturday evening.

A deposit of ten euros, or the price of your smallest service, is enough to change behaviour. Make it refundable if they cancel in time, and write that rule in one plain sentence right next to the button. Use the same payment methods as the shop — people trust what they recognise.

Test your own checkout, on your own phone

Buy the cheapest thing you sell, with your own money, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Four things to watch: does the page you land on after your banking app actually show a confirmation; does the e-mail arrive and does it say what happens next; does the order appear in your admin with the method visible; and — deliberately fail a payment — does the customer get a clear link to try again, or a dead end.

Half an hour of this finds more lost orders than a month of guessing.

What to do this week

  • Open your last fifty orders or bookings and write down the countries and the methods used. That list decides what you offer, not a blog post.
  • Place one real test order on your phone in every method you offer, including one you abandon halfway.
  • Choose one method to add and one to remove, note what you expect to happen, and look again in a month.

If you are not sure which one to drop, or your checkout does something odd on a phone, ITSysPro is happy to go through it with you, with no obligation.