Last month, Google announced that as of March 2, 2015, the company will retire the Google Wallet API for digital goods. While it plans to continue supporting the sale of apps on Google Play and in-app payments, customers will not be able to purchase any virtual goods or currency on a merchant’s website.

Explaining its reasons for the shutdown, Google cited the fact that the “industry has matured a lot” since the original launch of Google Wallet for digital goods, as well as the growing number of alternative payment solutions to choose from. When evaluating replacement solutions, Google recommends, since merchants know their buyers best, that they “research payment processing solutions to best fit the needs of [their] buyers.”

So, how do you identify the best solution for your buyers, as well as for your own business? To help make your research process as simple as possible, we have identified the following questions to ask payment providers when evaluating their solutions:

1.) Which countries do you support?

The digital goods market is an increasingly global one, and one shortcoming of Google Wallet is that, because of its credit card-centric focus, it catered primarily to customers in the US. But most merchants have customers—or potential customers—spread throughout the world, meaning that they need to offer other forms of payments besides credit cards if they want to monetize these customers effectively. Paymentwall does exactly that by offering more than 140 payment options to accept payments in over 200 countries, all in local language and currency to help increase your conversions throughout the world.     

2.) Do you offer flexible billing, payment, and user interface options?

One-time payments are easy to enable, but does the solution you’re considering also offer subscription billing to enable recurring payments? Can you set localized pricing in different countries? Can you customize the user interface to match your site’s look and feel? Paymentwall provides all of these, with easy-to-implement  advanced billing services such as recurring payments, trial subscriptions, the ability to set unique price points in 75+ local currencies, and fully customizable capabilities to let you personalize your checkout and UI to fit your brand’s needs.

3.) What are your merchant fees?

Be sure to compare the listed processing fees for each vendor you are considering. Paymentwall offers extremely competitive pricing for all of our payment solutions, including credit card transactions. Our credit card fees are a simple 2.9% + $0.30, whereas most of the leading credit card processors charge hidden fees, such as cross border fees for payments outside the United States, setup fees, or monthly minimums. Paymentwall keeps it simple.

4.) What are your fraud prevention tools and policies?

Low processing fees are one thing, but you could end up spending way more than you expect if you are hit with a large amount of fraudulent charges. Make sure whatever solution you choose has state-of-the-art fraud monitoring tools to ensure you are protected from chargebacks. Paymentwall is a fully PCI-DSS Level 1-certified payment service provider featuring our own proprietary fraud monitoring algorithms that allow us to adjust risk settings on a merchant by merchant basis to make Paymentwall the most effective in the industry at deterring fraud.

5.) What kind of support can I expect?

If you have questions about setting up or your account, can you speak with a live person? Perhaps more importantly, does the company offer live support to your customers, or will they simply redirect unhappy customers back to you? Paymentwall offers 24/7 live customer service for our merchants and for their customers as well, available in nearly 20 languages to make sure you and your customers can always get the help you need, right when you (or they) need it.

What’s next?

You have until March 2, 2015, to complete the switchover, but we don’t recommend waiting until the last minute. Once you have your new solution picked out, here are the steps you’ll need to take to complete the change:

  1. Remove the Google Wallet integration: This can be done by removing the client-side integration code and then removing the server-side code that generates the JSON Web Tokens. The final step is to remove the server-side code that handles the postback. View complete removal documentation here.
  2. Integrate your new solution: Paymentwall offers a fast and easy integration process to let you start accepting payments online in 200+ countries within 2 hours or less. Get started by setting up an account here. You can then check our documentation here to help you finish the integration process.
  3. Email your subscribers: If you have customers set up on subscription billing, Google will not contact them to let them know that they can no longer pay using Google Wallet, so it’s up to you to help them renew their subscription with Paymentwall.

We are here to help. If you have any questions about what makes Paymentwall an ideal solution to replace Google Wallet for your digital goods payments, or need help integrating our solution, please don’t hesitate to contact us.