Best Payment Gateways for Rental Websites and Marketplaces

On a rental platform, be it a single-vendor store or a multi-vendor marketplace, the workflows aren’t as simple as sales workflows. Rental workflows include various processes such as collecting, holding, and refunding security deposits and sanctioning rental terms and conditions. Similarly, rental invoicing is also quite complex and involves many variables like daily, weekly, or monthly rental charges, rental duration, security deposit, applicable taxes, and applied discounts. To generate accurate invoices and collect payments, online rental businesses need to carefully select their payment gateways.

Today, there are thousands of payment gateways available in the market. Considering the vast options and the difficulty that newly launched rental businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs face in selecting the appropriate payment gateways, we have prepared this comprehensive guide that will share some insights and proper selection criteria for payment gateways. Additionally, we have also shortlisted some gateways that you can integrate into your rental platform.

Rental Checkout Process	Earnings Withdrawal Process
– Customers enter rental dates. – Select add-ons. – Submit a rental security deposit. – Pay at checkout.	– Vendors reach withdrawal threshold.  – Complete minimum withdrawal period. – Send a withdrawal request. – Withdraw earnings.

Types of Audiences on a Rental Website

While the target audience of a rental website depends on the business model and preferences, it is wiser to accommodate your website with payment gateways to support a diverse audience. This may include but is not limited to:

• Local Audience: This is the primary audience of most rental businesses. The majority of payment gateways available in your country are designed to target this audience. 

• Tourist and Migrant Audience: This cohort includes migrants and tourists who are visiting your country for a limited time and require cars, bikes, RVs, adventure gear, boats, dresses, electrical appliances, and furniture on rent. You should thoroughly evaluate this audience before selecting the payment gateways. 

• Off-Shore Audience: For certain large-scale businesses, such as B2B heavy equipment businesses, where the ticket size is huge and the equipment is required to be shipped on a rental lease, you need features such as RFQ (to negotiate and store price quotations) and a payment gateway with manual invoicing. 

Detailed Payment Processing on a Rental Website

As discussed above, the workflows of a rental website are different from sales website. Due to this, the payment processing on rental websites is a bit different. For a better understanding, we have an exemplary payment processing workflow:

Step 1: The rental website redirects the customer to the payment gateway on checkout. 

Step 2: The payment gateway levies its transaction charge on the total checkout amount, which is either a small percentage of the amount or flat rate charges. Meaning, that for a $100 transaction and a 1% transaction fee, the amount that a rental business will be getting in its account is $99, whereas the remaining $1 would be taken by the payment gateway as a processing fee. 

Step 3: The payment gateway authorizes a security deposit on the customer’s credit card, which is to be released after a set date or in case of any defaults or reimbursements. 

Step 4: The entire amount is then split into multiple stakeholders’ accounts as per their respective charges. Some of these stakeholders are:

• The rental website’s bank (for accepting the rental fee)
• The customer’s bank (for payment processing)
• The card network, such as Visa or Mastercard (in case of card payments)
• The payment gateway (for payment processing)
• Security deposit authorization on credit card

Step 5: The payment gateways hold the security deposit till the defined period or unless the admin authorizes any payment early because of any defaults.

Step 6: The authorized security deposit hold is released and the remaining balance is returned to the customer.

Characteristics to Look for in Your Payment Gateways

The global payments industry has been at the forefront of all digital businesses, acting as a strong resilient facilitator for complex payment processing and enabling business growth. Considering the massive scale of the eCommerce industry, it would also be correct to say that the entire eCommerce ecosystem currently relies on safe and secure payment gateways.

However, all the complexities in regard to sales-based business models and rental-based business models are also true, making it a necessity to carefully evaluate payment gateway options. Well-thought payment gateways will not only help you facilitate rental payments and satisfy customers but also in business expansion and growth. 

Here are some key characteristics entrepreneurs should consider while selecting payment gateways:

1. Transaction Fees

Different payment gateways have different transaction fee structures. While some charge a small percentage of the overall transaction amount as transaction fees, others have defined flat-rate transaction fees. The same can vary depending on the size of the transaction and the monthly sales volume. For example,  the transaction fees will be lower on high monthly volume sales and vice versa. Thus, it is recommended to overview such conditions and select payment gateways with genuine transaction fees. 

2. Payment Methods

New entrants often misunderstand payment gateways as payment methods on the marketplace. While payment methods refer to ways a customer can pay for a transaction, payment gateways are the facilitators who process those payments. Thus, inside a payment gateway, you can find multiple supported payment methods. Go for the ones that include your audience’s most preferred payment methods. These can include debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers, regional eWallets, and other local payment methods.

3. Split Payment

The split payment option with a rental security hold is very important on rental websites. The hold is usually kept for 7-14 days and ensures timely payments and refunds to both parties (product owner and customer) on the marketplace. The admin can also make deductions from the hold to reimburse any damages. Once the holding time is over, the payment is automatically returned to the customer’s bank account.

4. Recurring Payments

The recurring payment option places a standing order on the debit card, credit card, or bank transfer. On reaching the stipulated dates, the payment gateway automatically executes the order and deducts the payment from the customer’s account. This type of payment option is highly required in rental businesses with monthly subscriptions. 

Also check out: How maximizing eCommerce Revenue with Rental Operations

5. Security

Ensuring payment security is of utmost importance in a payment gateway. To ensure this, the payment gateway should follow strict payment security standards and protocols. Some of these are:

• PCI DSS Compliance
• SSL and TLS encryption
• 3-D secure 2 which includes two-factor authentication
• Tokenization
• SET (Secure Electronic Transaction)

Additionally, some payment gateways also have in-built fraud detection and prevention solutions.

6. Hosting and Uptime

In terms of hosting, payment gateways can be of two types, hosted and non-hosted. Hosted payment gateways redirect customers from your site to their own site. These are highly secure and reliable and offer excellent uptime. On the other hand, non-hosted gateways complete transactions on your very own site and provide more flexibility in customization, ensuring a better interface. If you can manage a non-hosted payment gateway and ensure good uptime, only then you should opt for non-hosted payment gateways. Otherwise, hosted payment gateways are a more reliable option.

7. Supported Currencies and Localization

The payment gateway that you select should support the currency of your target regions. It is even better to select a payment gateway with multi-currency support. Additionally, integrate payment gateways that are well-recognized by the target audience. This will help establish trust and mitigate the risk aversion mindset of consumers. 

8. Integration

Your selected payment gateways should also be easy to integrate with your website. In this regard, hosted payment gateways are better as they only require basic configuration. However, if you do have a design team, you can opt for non-hosted payment gateways as well. 

Recommended Payment Gateways for a Rental Website

Name	Security	Hold and Recurring Payments	Integration	Countries	Currency
Stripe	PCI-DSS, EMVco, SOC compliance and more	Supports payment hold, security deposits, and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	195+	135+ currencies
Amazon Payment Services (PayFort)	PCI-DSS, 3D secure, Anti-fraud and more	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Bahrain	All MENA region currencies supported
PayU Money	PCI-DSS, 3D secure, fraud prevention, tokenization and in-house security tools	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	Available in 27 countries	80+ currencies
CCAvenue	PC-DSS, SSL, and fraud prevention tools	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted (Comes with a customizable page on the hosted server as well)	India	27 currencies
Khipu	TLS, SLS, and more	Supports recurring payments	Hosted	Bolivia, Chile	Chile Peso
PayPal	PCI-DSS, SLS and in-house security tools	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	Available in 200+ countries	25 currencies
Razorpay	PCI-DSS, 3D secure, and in-house security tools	Supports both payment hold (via escrow) and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	India	Indian Rupees
Verifone (2Checkout)	PCI-DSS, tokenization, fraud detection	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	Available in 200+ countries	101 currencies
Opn Payments (Omise)	PCI-DSS, 3D secure, fraud detection, NIST, TLS, and more	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia	13 currencies
Braintree	PCI-DSS, 3D secure, fraud detection, and more	Supports recurring payments	Both hosted and non-hosted	45 countries	130 currencies
M-Pesa	PCI-DSS, in-built fraud prevention tools	Supports both payment hold and recurring payments	Hosted	16 countries in South Africa, Central America and the Middle East  combined	Congolese Franc and US Dollars
Elavon	PCI-DSS, encryption, and tokenization	Supports recurring payments	Hosted	36 countries	100+ currencies

Note: The information in the table has been compiled from various sources and is accurate to the best of our knowledge. However, due to the heterogeneity of data sources, there still remains scope for slight discrepancies.

Conclusion

Safe and secure payments are the backbone of all rental businesses. To facilitate them, there are a number of payment gateways that are available in the market. For rental marketplaces, these payment gateways play a few essential roles, such as collecting and storing rental security deposits and enabling recurring payments. To fulfill these requirements or match your desired business model, you can look forward to integrating the aforementioned payment gateways. A better way to integrate multiple payment gateways is to opt for readymade rental software. YoRent is a leading rental software with multi-currency and multilingual support. It comes with 25+ pre-integrated payment gateways to help simplify rental payments.