Updated 11/06/2022
There are many ways to accept credit/debit card payments in your online shop, either directly on your website (not recommended unless you aim to be PCI compliant) or through a 3rd party provider that acts as a Payment Gateway. We review here the best Payment Gateways for WooCommerce stores in Australia.
What is a Payment Gateway?
Payment Gateways are online service providers that take credit and debit card payments. Some also take payments from electronic wallets like PayPal and Apple Pay. And “Buy now pay later” options such as Afterpay are getting more an more popular.
With these providers, credit/debit card details never transit through your website so you don’t need to worry too much about PCI Compliance.
Credit/Debit card payments are temporarily stored on a Merchant Account, usually provided by the Payment Gateway. After a few days, these payments are transferred to the business bank account.
Compatible with WooCommerce
There are numerous Payment Gateways available for the Australian market but only some of them can be integrated with a WooCommerce online store on a WordPress website. The full list is available on the WooCommerce website.
For Australian consumers
The payment gateways listed in the table below are the most common ones for small businesses and small not-for-profit organisations selling to the Australian market.
Our criteria
We mostly evaluated the WordPress plugin (software) that integrates WooCommerce to the Payment Gateway, rather than the Gateway itself.
- Good support (from experience and educated guess)
- Likely life span
- Price (the most popular are free)
We looked at the pricing for single transactions. A large store with a high volume of monthly transactions would get better rates but this article specifically targets small businesses and not-for-profit organisations.
WooCommerce now offers by default its own payment solution called WooCommerce Payments. It’s built on Stripe and it may charge an extra foreign exchange fee so we don’t think it’s worth at the moment.
