Many businesses that stick strictly to brick-and-mortar retail have struggled with how best to accept and process certain forms of payment. Things get even more complicated when engaging in online commerce, as quite a few companies have discovered.

In the past, many businesses ended up opting to cobble together online payment systems from the components that were available to them. Comprehensive solutions like BlueSnap are making things far simpler in just about every common case.

E-Commerce is a Lot More Complicated Than Would be Hoped

Opening up a traditional merchant account used to seem like a fairly complex and challenging step for many businesses. Processing offline payment card transactions, though, is a lot simpler than accommodating buyers online.

In addition to credit and debit cards, digital shoppers have many other payment schemes available to them. In some cases, a particular payment network will be the norm in a particular country or region but virtually unheard of elsewhere in the world.

Each of these forms of payment also comes with associated requirements and terms. Accounting for all that complexity can make understanding the notoriously complicated Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard seem like a cakewalk.

The Best Way for Most Companies to Process Payments

Businesses that try to develop their own payment systems almost inevitably run into problems. In many cases, the natural response will be to scale back capabilities and features in order to keep things as simple as possible.

Unfortunately, that will most often mean failing to serve certain customers as well as they should be. A superior option, in most cases, will be to simply adopt a payment platform that has been designed to be as comprehensive and uncompromising as possible.

Some companies rule such options out from the start because of a belief that they would need to sacrifice too much to make use of them. In practice, though, the best digital payment platforms today are as effective at integrating with existing arrangements as they are at anything else.

As a result, most businesses that take an honest look at the opportunities before them discover that switching to a third-party payment system makes the most sense, in the end. That will almost always be the best way to avoid all the trouble that can come from trying to handle everything alone.