Hey everyone! I’m starting a series of articles on integrating payments into a website.

If you’re aiming for commercial results — not just running a personal blog or a non-profit project — you need to take payments seriously. And it doesn’t start with code. It starts with choosing the right payment systems.

One of the most underrated growth tools is the number of payment options you offer. It sounds obvious, but the numbers back it up. A/B tests across different projects show one thing consistently: the more payment methods you offer, the higher your conversion. Everyone has their own preferred way to pay — some use cards, others prefer PayPal, some go with Apple Pay. When you give users a familiar option, you remove a barrier.

Now let’s talk honestly about what a proper integration actually looks like — and what it costs.

Redirects are the enemy

The fastest way to integrate any payment system is to redirect users to an external site. Click the button, leave your site, confirm payment on the payment gateway’s page, then return.

It works. But the price you pay is lost orders. In our experience, this approach kills 10–20% of conversions. Every time a user leaves your site, they get distracted, lose context — and sometimes they simply don’t come back.

Subscriptions are the backbone of your business

If you’re selling services rather than one-off products, your business runs on subscriptions. They bring predictable revenue, loyal users, and the ability to plan ahead.

Different platforms handle subscriptions differently. Stripe builds them around Price and Product, while PayPal uses Plan and Product. But the core idea is the same: first you create an object that defines the rate — then you create the subscription. This isn’t a technical quirk. It’s architecture that lets you manage pricing, add trial periods, and adjust terms cleanly. Get it right from the start, and you won’t have to rewrite everything every time you run a new promo.

Discounts are a retention lever

First-month discounts, yearly plan discounts, progressive discounts (the longer you stay, the better the deal), referral bonuses — they all work. People are more likely to pay when they see a clear offer. And a well-designed discount system doesn’t just increase the average check — it reduces churn.

To make discounts flexible, you don’t need anything complicated. You just need your side to be able to calculate the final amount with all conditions applied, and send that final amount to the payment system. Build that once, and you can experiment with pricing freely without touching the payment integration again.

Integrate directly, avoid middlemen

Some payment gateways —Authorize.net, for example — let you connect third-party payment methods through them. It’s convenient for the developer: one API to cover multiple methods. But for the user, it looks strange. They don’t see the familiar interface they expect; they see some intermediate form. That breaks trust and hurts conversion.

We always integrate payment systems directly. Users see the native interface, log in the way they’re used to — and the payment goes through without friction. Direct integrations consistently perform better.

A unified payment database is your foundation

Every payment system has its own tools for handling taxes, discounts, currencies. Rely on them exclusively, and in six months you’ll be tangled in your own logic and struggling to maintain multiple integrations.

The better approach is this: all calculation logic — discounts, taxes, currency conversions — lives in your project. The payment system only receives the final amount and a confirmation of success. It doesn’t need to know what makes up that amount. This gives you complete freedom: you can change business logic, introduce new discounts, adjust tax rates — and everything will work across all your payment methods without extra work.

In the next article, we’ll dive into the practical side: how to set up subscriptions, one-time payments, webhooks, and a flexible discount system in PayPal. No redirects, no lost customers, based on real-world experience.

For now, remember this: the easier you make it to pay, the higher your conversion. The fewer steps and redirects, the fewer customers you lose. And the more business logic you keep in your own project, the easier it is to manage your business.