When it comes to designing your website, it's crucial that you make your checkout page as convenient, simple, and seamless to navigate as possible for your customers. After all, the checkout page is where the rubber meets the road, you might say. That is, it's where customers ultimately decide to buy what you are selling.

There are two types of checkout pages to choose from—on-site or hosted.

An on-site payments page is located on your website. To put it another way, you are the host, and your customers never leave your website. Consider it a “self-hosted” payments page.

Now, compare this to a hosted payments page. A hosted payments page is a checkout page located on a third-party website. When a customer clicks on your site to make a payment, he or she is directed away from your website to a new site. In general, this new site, with its hosted checkout page, is provided by your merchant payments provider or gateway. 

Hosted payment checkouts—they're made to order.

With a hosted checkout page, everything that is required to complete a sale at checkout is stored on the server of the provider of the hosted checkout page rather than being stored on your web hosting provider's server. This includes the customer information needed to make a payment happen, the actual processing of the payment itself, and finally, the generation of payment confirmation and receipt.

Once your customer completes the checkout payment process, he or she is redirected back to your website. But in all the time your customer is at the hosted checkout page, he or she might not even realize that they are actually at another web page. 

Your customers will see the payment processor or payment gateway's brand name on the checkout page, but they'll also see your name if you utilize a hosted payment checkout page that allows for personalized customization. That means being able to add your logo and business colors and sometimes your own design templates.   

Why should you want a hosted payments checkout page? Lots of reasons.

The best reason to have a hosted payments checkout page is that it puts most of the onus for security on the third party.

We all know how crucial it is for businesses to provide a safe and secure website for customers to make online payments. Without such confidence in the safety of an online transaction, customers simply will not want to do business with you. 

With a hosted payments checkout, the responsibility for managing, transmitting, and protecting sensitive consumer data falls to the hosted payment checkout provider. And that's a good thing because they are experts at processing. 

Frankly, handling security yourself can be costly if you are a small business owner. It also requires some in-depth coding knowledge. Meanwhile, self-hosted payment pages significantly increase the scope of your PCI compliance requirements.

And the cost for this service? Just a small transaction fee. Which is not a lot to pay for a whole lot of peace of mind for both you and your customers.

Give your customers more of what they want—multiple payment options.

The entire hosted payment page integration process is about as simple as user-experience design gets. This is excellent news for small businesses or those offering simple products or services. You don't need a team of MIT graduates to set up a hosted payments checkout page. A few coding keystrokes should do the trick. Most hosted payment checkout page vendors have partnerships in place with the many different payment options now available, like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Because these relationships already exist, there is very little for you to do to set up a connection to these alternative payment services.  

A third-party host has the most for you.  

Enhanced PCI-compliance. Less liability for you. Easy set-up. Simple customization. Ability to accept alternative payment options. Add it all up, and a hosted payments page is probably the right addition to your website.