What is payment gateway?

A payment gateway is a separate service and acts as an intermediary between the merchants' shopping cart and all the financial networks involved with the transaction, including the customers' credit card issuer and your merchant account. It is like an EFTPOS terminal in cyberspace. It checks for validity, encrypts transaction details for security, ensures they are sent to the correct destination and then decrypts the responses which are sent back to the shopping cart.

FAQs

How will I know when I have an order?
When using a payment gateway system in connection with the cart, you will receive all of your orders via e-mail. As a merchant you will receive 2 e-mail messages, the first is generated by the cart, and supplies you with the necessary information to fulfill the order, such as names, addresses, and items ordered. The second will come from your payment gateway, and will tell you the status of the order approval. You should wait to ship a product until you have received this order status message.

What if the customer's payment method is declined?
If you receive a declined message from your gateway regarding an order, you will need to contact the customer and ask for alternative payment. The customer will not receive notification via e-mail of the approval status.

What about the security of E-Mail?
All information pertaining to credit card payment is stripped from all e-mail before being sent out.

Is the gateway just html that I copy into my website?
No. The gateway requires that the Merchant integrate their website into the gateway forms or API via CGI, ASP or other scripting languages.

What are the most popular payment gateways ?
The most popular payment gateways are Card Service International, Verisign payflow.

Is it easy to use payment gateways ?
You must have a moderate understanding of HTML/CGI/ASP in order to fully exploit the features of the Payment Gateway. Although it is true that most of payment gateway providers provide you with the snippets of HTML code that can be copied and pasted directly into a web site and it would "work", it is not likely that all of the specific needs you have with your web site will be met simply by copying and pasting this code.