Adding payment acceptance to a website could be as easy as embedding a YouTube video or sharing a link on Facebook.
That's the pitch WePay Services is making to online merchants in offering new payment "buttons" without requiring them to write complex code or redirect shoppers to another payment page.
After registering with WePay, merchants simply choose any of four payment buttons from the WePay website and paste them on their own website. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based online payments provider handles the rest of the process, WePay CEO and co-founder Bill Clerico says.
WePay has provided online payment services for more than two years, but most recently has been more aggressive in marketing itself as
WePay developed the payment button based on feedback from merchants that requested a payment function that does not send shoppers to another company's site to handle payments, Clerico says.
By providing the necessary code for the payment button, WePay has hit upon a service that online merchants will find helpful, says David Kaminsky, analyst for emerging payments with Mercator Advisory Group.
"WePay doesn't require customized integration because they provide all of the necessary code that can just be copied directly into the coding for the site," Kaminsky says.
Custom integration often "takes weeks" to accomplish correctly, he adds.
"A copy-and-paste integration that takes only minutes would be a big benefit, especially to smaller merchants who can't afford to dedicate resources to weeks of customization," Kaminsky says.
Merchants choose from Buy Now, Register, Donate, or Add to Cart buttons for their sites.
When on a site using WePay, the consumer clicks the "Buy Now" button and proceeds to checkout in a secure cloud-based page on the WePay server. The page is presented in a frame on the merchant's site, so the payment process seems to stay there.
With this setup, merchants never hold or store card data, thus eliminating any concerns about Payment Card Industry data security compliance as it relates to storing data, Clerico says.
WePay has kept its main focus on small online businesses for nearly two years. The economy has hurt large retailers, while small companies have sprouted because many unemployed people have started their own business, Clerico says.
WePay touts a simple payment formula of 2.9% plus 30 cents for credit card transactions and 1% plus 30 cents for bank payments. Merchants do not pay setup, monthly or hidden service fees, Clerico says.
