Probably many of you are already operate an e-commerce site, or are thinking about setting one up.

When you do, one thing to think about is which payment service to choose.

Last year, at the request of one of our clients, a foreign brand that runs an e-commerce site, we conducted a survey of payment service providers.

To use a payment service, you must enter into an agreement with the credit card companies.

There are two ways of doing this.
– An umbrella member store agreement
– An individual member store agreement

Under an umbrella member store agreement, the payment service provider signs an agreement with each card company, so there is no need for the merchant to negotiate an agreement with each of them individually.
Under an individual member store agreement, the merchant negotiates an agreement with each card company directly.

Our client was using an umbrella agency agreement, but as the service under their existing agreement was coming to an end, they were investigating the possibility of changing to another company.

For the purposes of our survey, the service needed to offer the following:

– Contract possible under an umbrella agent service
– Service in the Japanese market
– Compatibility with the e-commerce platform “Magento”, which was used to build the client’s site
– Support in English, and the ability to switch between Japanese and English
– Ability to use Visa, Mastercard, JCB, AMEX and Diners

First, based on the points above, we made a selection of representative payment services.

This is exclusively a payment services company, and the only one listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It also boasts the largest market share in Japan. One of its features is support for payment on delivery, and for product dispatch you can use the Yu-Pack parcel service or Seino Transportation’s Kangaroo service.

Epsilon provides a low-cost plan, perfect for deployment in small businesses. For credit card payments it offers the initial fee, monthly fee and transaction processing fees all for 0 Yen.

This offers a stable and reliable support system, providing a 24 hour call center and quick deployment. As well as its 24 hour user support, the merchant support is also fully featured.

This service has an established reputation for safety due to its excellent electronic payments technology. Another advantage is that, as well as the main payment services, it can deploy a number of other payment methods at once, including international services such as UnionPay and Alipay International.

A payment service operated by the Sony Bank Group, said to be the industry leader in processing speed. As well as 3-D Secure, it also introduced its own “authentication assist service”, unique in the industry, to provide a highly secure environment.

The world’s largest online payment service, it is also able to use credit cards issued overseas. With other companies it can take from 3 weeks to up to 3 months to introduce credit card payments, but with PayPal the registration can be completed in just a few minutes.

A payment service run by the well known retail giant Amazon. A big feature of this service is the convenience of payment and product delivery using Amazon.co.jp account information.

As well as its scale and e-commerce site development environment, this service is distinguished by the ability to choose your connection method. It also provides a free shopping cart system and rental carts, as well as support for e-commerce site payments.

Financed 50/50 by DeNA Ltd and Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos Ltd., it offers services based on high level of technology and a solid management base. If you are building a site using an e-commerce package, one of the features of this service is the ability to keep development costs to a minimum.

This service has an advantage that only a logistics company can offer – being able to deploy merchant services and product delivery simultaneously. The initial fee is free, enabling a significant reduction of processing and costs.

Deployment is easy, and it also supports payment using prepaid cards. At the start of the contract it offers technical support in both Japanese and English.

Download a PDF version of the table above.

Survey Results

From these results, based on Magento compatibility, English support and a switchable English/Japanese administration page, we narrowed the services down to the following three:

• Paypal
• PAYGENT
• Veritrans 3G

Because PayPal does not support AMEX or Diners, and PAYGENT’s English support is said to take time, we determined that Veritrans best met the client’s conditions. Payment services are evolving day by day. If we assume multiple currencies, multilingual compatibility, administrator nationality and purchases from smartphones, an even wider range of choices becomes available.

In order to provide customers with a better environment, we recommend reviewing payment services on a regular basis. We hope that this survey will serve as a reference for those of you who are investigating the deployment of a payment service or a multilingual, multi-currency e-commerce site.