Payment Gateways for POS in Hong Kong (Informational)
- qualicominnovations
- Dec 11, 2015
- 3 min read
Qualicom Retailarc has gone through quite a number of credit card payment gateway providers in Hong Kong for our clients. As you know, today many restauranteurs and retailers want to receive credit cards online or offline from their customers. But there are not many articles about the payment gateways in Hong Kong, so we would like to share our information with you.
There are major 3 types of payment gateway providers in Hong Kong.
1. Banks
The first type is banks. Retailers can apply PIN Pad machines from local banks such as Hang Seng Bank, the Bank of East Asia and Chong Hing Bank, etc. Some banks such as HSBC will also have this service, but they will refer you to Global Payments. You can actually see the bank logos on the PIN pad if you want to figure out which banks’ PIN pad others are using.
2. Non-Bank Providers
The second type is the non-bank providers of electronic transaction. They will provide a gateway for you and some will deal with the banks on behalf of you. But for special cases, you will have to deal with banks directly. There are a few popular payment gateway companies in Hong Kong, for example, Global Payment, PayDollar, AsiaPay, PCCW, etc. They will process major credit cards of Visa and Mastercard, etc.
Both the first and second types of companies will need you to submit similar types of documents such as BR with commercial address, CI, 2 to 3 years’ financial statements, latest 3 Months Bank Account Statement, company organization chart, tenancy agreement for stores or office, ID cards of director and shareholders, etc. The processing time for each application normally lasts for 3 to 8 weeks depending on different companies.
After they collect your application documents, an in-depth checking and site visit will be gone through by their staff. The purpose is to ensure that your business is qualified and suitable to use their service. If you do not qualified by one of the above-mentioned company because some documents cannot fulfil their requirements, you would probably face the same situation for all the rest of the companies as there are common standard requirements. The fees will normally include one-time setup fee, annual merchant account fee, merchant discount rate and transaction fee, etc.
3. Paypals
The third type is the e-service provider such as Paypal. Paypal provides various types of ecommerce payment gateways for websites. Moreover, they provide a virtual machine for business to accept credit card payments simply through their online Paypal account. The virtual machine works similar to the in-store physical PIN pads. They process real-time credit card transactions for you. However, they will need you to login to your paypal account, open the virtual terminal page, and then type in credit cards information for your clients to process a payment. This is a little inconvenient and slower than using physical PIN pad in stores. But the benefit is as long as you can connect to internet, you are always able to accept credit cards immediately.
This function is especially useful if you often have small-size mobile sales events or you are not qualify to apply physical PIN pads due to any reasons. There is one more benefit for Paypal service, they will provide API for developers who want to integrate their services. That means, you can automate the process if you know how to do integration. Paypal services’ application duration usually takes 3 weeks.
All the above-mentioned methods will require the retail companies to apply by themselves. Other third-party companies normally could not apply on behalf of the retail companies.
Conclusion
If you are running a brick-and-mortar with stable income, credit card payments count for a significant proportion of your sales, you might get it done by banks or non-bank providers of electronic transaction as it will be more convenient to use a physical PIN pad in stores and you could make ends meet even though the fees is not very low. If you run a small business, ecommerce sites, company with a special business model or have limited resources, you can try Paypal first as it is relatively cheaper and easier to setup.
Tips:
Early research for the payment gateways by different providers is important as they will need time to check whether you are fit. If you are not fit, it might be too late to switch to other providers who also need time to process your application.
You should ask clearly about the details of the documents for successful application. Again, this could prevent wasting your time of waiting for eligibility verifying process.
Fees are also one key factor that you should compare and consider.
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