Understanding payment gateways

Introduction

There are 3 main ways of accepting payments online. You can use a payment gateway (seamless or non-seamless) to process credit card payments immediately through a payment gateway, you can collect credit card details for offline processing or you can use offline payment methods such as COD, Cheque or Direct Debit and then mark your orders as paid once you check your bank account.

Note: You can only use one payment gateway per website plus PayPal Standard. You can use as many offline processing method as you require. You can see all available options in Cusomizing Registration Form article.

Seamless vs Non-seamless payment gateways

A seamless payment gateway is one that processes credit cards directly on your online shop website without redirecting the purchasing customer to any 3rd party website. The whole transaction is seamless and takes place in real-time. On the other hand a non-seamless payment gateway such as PayPal will redirect the purchasing customer to the PayPal website to process the payment and will redirect the customer back to the online shop after this has been completed.

Must I use a payment gateway?

You can elect not to use a payment gateway and still receive payments through your site. Payment Gateways are great because the sale goes through (almost) instantly, and both you and your customer receive appropriate feedback that the payment has been received. However, the system also allows you to process payments offline, which means that the customer's credit card details are sent to you so that you can process it yourself, in your own time.

Payment gateways and recurring payments

The system allows you to accept recurring orders, This is when you create an order which re-occurs periodically, and automatically charges the customer's credit card.

If you are going to be creating orders like this to collect recurring payments (for example, subscription payments), you must select a payment gateway that supports them. To see the list of gateways which support recurring billing you can see Gateways which support recurring biling article and click on the gateway name for specific information for that gateway.

Complete list of currently supported payment gateways

The following is the list of supported gateways, the countries they may be used in, if they're seamless or not, if they support recurrance and anti-freud. 

Payment Gateway security

Although we provide up to date security measures to protect your site against fraudulent users, we recommend you to also take advantage of the anti-fraud systems provided by each payment gateway. Contact your payment gateway provider for further assistance.

Setting up your payment gateway

After logging in to your admin console, navigate to eCommerce > Payment gateways. You will need to select the country code you want to assign this gateway to inside Country to configure for: dropdown. This country will need to match the country of the domain names you have added to your site under Site Settings > Site Domains.

Each Payment Gateway has a different requirement, and as such you will be asked to input different items (such as user account name, merchant ID, transaction key, etc) depending on the gateway provider. Select the gateway you wish to use and you will see what details you need to provide for that gateway.

Testing payment gateways

The best way to test a payment gateway operation is to -

• Create a 1 cent product, and add it to your catalogue.
• Purchase the product using all available payment methods.
• Ensure the order is created. If using PayPal, ensure the payment status is set to “success”
• Check your invoice that you were emailed
• Ensure the site owner has received their order workflow notification.

Using the payment gateway's test gateways is possible, however often requires special credentials and card details to be used...and we do not recommend it unless absolutely necessary.

When testing your gateway you can use this site to reference test cards if needed. - http://www.infomerchant.net/creditcardprocessing/credit_card_test_numbers.html