The top 5 shopping cart plugins every bank or PSP should offer

Offer the right shopping cart plugins to help your merchants accept online payments.

Before financial institutions, like banks and PSPs, go ahead and select today’s most popular shopping cart plugins, they must first understand some more nuanced aspects of merchants’ eCommerce sites. Simply put, anyone wanting to sell anything online needs a website to do it. Few build one from scratch; most opt for an eCommerce platform.

Plugin options

The customers of banks and PSPs—merchants with eCommerce sites—have three options aside from building everything from scratch:

Build a self-hosted website (e.g., eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, and PrestaShop) – This approach requires more advanced technical knowledge. It is usually limited to companies who have an experienced developer on staff because the merchant is solely responsible for hosting, coding, CRM, CMS, ERP, and security issues.
Use Software-as-a-Service (e.g., Shopify and BigCommerce) – SaaS services require less in-house tech knowledge and minimal responsibility for hosting and maintenance. Yet SaaS remains extremely user-friendly and customizable, all for a fixed monthly fee and often a small percentage per transaction, making this one of the most popular options for online merchants (especially SMEs).
Employ Commerce-as-a-Service – CaaS, also referred to as ‘headless commerce’, occurs when the front-end and back-end stand alone. This requires large in-house teams at big merchants (e.g., businesses like Zalando, Under Armour, and Chanel) . These types of companies build their own website over an existing eCommerce engine that directly integrates payment solutions with a bank.

Options one and two are the most popular with merchants, but once their site is built and visitors stream in, how does one convert a shopper into a buyer? How can you help merchants accept payments from their customers? No matter what kind of site the merchant has built, the answer is simple: Provide the checkout functionality (a.k.a. payment gateway) via the right shopping cart plugins.

By adding checkout functionality to an eCommerce platform, one enables a connection from the online payment solution offered by the bank and the merchant website itself. If competing with big players like Mollie, Stripe, or Adyen is your goal, use the right plugins to facilitate a smooth eCommerce solution for your merchants.

Shopping cart plugins

Plugins allow for inserting external code into an existing merchant site without writing any new code. Gingers uses this functionality to create a seamless connection between the web shop and your eCommerce merchant solution. If all that sounds too technical, just remember that shopping cart plugins power and facilitate payment acceptance on eCommerce sites.

Shopping Cart Plugins

As a financial institution, you want your merchant solution to make it as easy as possible for merchants to accept payments in their online shop through plugins. Since you want to accommodate a range of merchants, a wide variety of plugins is necessary. Roughly 10-15 plugins will cover 90% of the merchants, so you need quite a few to get started.

Start by providing the 5 most important shopping cart plugins for a European merchant solution and scale up, if necessary, from there. Ginger recommends starting with these top 5 plugins for European markets:

WooCommerce (self-hosted);
Magento (self-hosted);
PrestaShop (self-hosted);
Shopify (SaaS); and
Shopware (self-hosted).

Some other, well-known honorable mentions, to consider: OpenCart; BigCommerce; Wix; Ecwid; Zencart; Lightspeed; and CCV Shop.

Creating custom integrations with each and every plugin can take a long time and places considerable pressure on development resources. That’s why Ginger built plugins for all of the above mentioned major eCommerce platforms so you can get a head start. Ginger looks after the monthly updates and maintenance while troubleshooting merchant issues, meaning you don’t have to give plugins a second thought.

Plugins are a small but important component of any comprehensive merchant payments solution. Reach out to learn more about how Ginger helps banks, PSPs, PayFacs and ISOs with their full-stack eCommerce solution.