When four-time world surfski champion Dawid Mocke started gaining international interest in his line of personal flotation devices and other paddling gear, he quickly realised an effective e-commerce website and an easy-to-use payment gateway were essential.
“We have a niche business in a fiercely competitive field and it’s essential to make the experience as easy as possible for our customers if we want them to buy, and come back,” says Mocke. “We’ve learned that when the checkout process is complicated, we lose sales.”
When mockepaddling.com was first launched in 2007 Mocke chose PayGate’s payment gateway services because it was simple to implement and made it easy for him to get paid: “I already had a merchant account with my bank and payments went straight into that account, with no extra transfers or processes needed. It made everything more predictable in terms of the fees I was paying.”
PayGate also offered excellent fraud protection and accountability, he says. “I always found PayGate to be very responsive,” he says. “I had recourse. They have their own in-house risk engine, PayProtector, which blocked most fraudulent transaction attempts; but when a couple did get through and had to be reversed, it was no problem.”
Mocke briefly used another payment service when his site was redesigned based on a WordPress template, but has since decided to return to PayGate. “There were two dealbreaker issues for me with the other service,” he says. “The first is that payments didn’t go directly into my own bank account – the service provider held the money until I transferred it, which was expensive and very cumbersome. Secondly, PayGate allows me to process refunds, which the other service provider didn’t do.”
Being able to process refunds is critical from a customer service point of view, says Mocke. “Sometimes people change their minds, or decide to come in and pick something up instead of having it delivered — things happen. We could just tell them ‘too bad, no refunds’, but that would be terrible customer service. It certainly wouldn’t win us the repeat customers we want.”
As an added bonus, Mocke also discovered that PayGate now offers free plug-ins for most well-known shopping carts — saving site owners the annual plugin licence fee.
“To sell online successfully you need to communicate clearly, with an authentic voice,” he says. “It’s much harder than chatting with someone who walks into our bricks-and-mortar store. We have to build trust by communicating clearly, making sure we carry reviews prominently on the site and making the payment process simple and logical. PayGate as a payment service provider helps us build that trust.”
