How to integrate a payment gateway into a website?

Many essential components to successfully accepting credit card payments from customers exist. The main point is that you will never accept card payments from customers without a payment gateway.

Before you can get all the benefits of using a payment gateway, you need to decide what type of gateway will be the best alternative for your business and understand how to integrate that payment gateway into your website.

Basic types of payment gateways you need to know about

Right now, without further ado, we’ll go over the most popular types of payment gateways:

• Hosted.
• Non-hosted or integrated;

A feature of a hosted payment gateway is that the customer makes a payment not on your site but a third-party one. After the customer fills out all the data on your site, he will be redirected to another site. Is this good or bad for you? There are pros and cons here.

Advantages:

• Your company doesn’t have to be PCI compliant;
• Local small companies are much better suited this way;
• Payment processing is not your problem;
• Integration is effortless and does not take much time.

As for the disadvantages, they are pretty obvious. Not every customer will want to visit another site without being fully confident in its security. Accordingly, all this will harm your conversion. In addition, you will not be able to control the process of purchase fully.

How does integration with such a gateway work?

There is nothing complicated, and as a rule, all the necessary information regarding integration can be found on the provider you choose. To summarize, the essence of the integration will be that you will be given some JavaScript code, and when this code is embedded into the site code, you will have a button on your site that customers can click on to pay for their purchase.

An example of such a gateway would be PayPal, as well as Stripe.

Accordingly, customers will not need to follow a third-party site to complete a purchase, thanks to integrated gateways. Merchant’s company website will do all actions related to payment on the merchant’s company website.

Accordingly, there will be completely different advantages here, such as:

• A higher degree of customer trust. Thanks to the absence of transfers to other resources, the client will be confident that your company will reliably protect all information. It will benefit conversion rates;
• Robust API integration;
• If you wish, you can easily set up a payment system precisely as you need, considering your company’s peculiarities and activities.

Those advantages, which were with hosted payment gateways, in case of integrated ones become disadvantages, namely:

• The merchant’s company is responsible for keeping customer data safe. In the case of data leakage, all responsibility lies on a merchant’s shoulders;
• Your company must be PCI compliant;
• Integration of a payment gateway is relatively complicated and will take much longer than with a hosted gateway.

The API integration is complicated, and you are unlikely to implement it without special skills.

Examples of such gateways are Braintree and Authorize.net.

The most well-known gateway providers, their advantages and disadvantages

Today the market offers dozens of different gateway providers. Still, it makes no sense to consider each of them. Let’s take a small look at only the global market leaders and what they offer to their customers.

PayPal

This company is the most famous payment gateway provider in the world.

The advantages of the company’s gateway include:

• Lack of complexity with the integration;
• High-security level, which is provided by data encryption;
• Perfect for absolutely any company, regardless of its size;
• High level of flexibility;
• 24/7 support.

Stripe

From a small company, Stripe became one of the leaders in the payments market.

With this service, you have an opportunity to accept payments in 135 different currencies. The company’s payment gateway integrates perfectly and fast enough with all the platforms; the reliable data encryption ensures zero probability of interception. Such a payment gateway is an optimal alternative

PayOp

PayOp has started its journey in 2016, and from that time, has transformed into a global financial institution.

It offers the following solutions:

• Local acquiring with 200 payment methods, including credit and debit cards;
• Processing high-risk industries;
• Various integration options;
• Payment processing solutions for merchants without a merchant account.

Amazon Payments

The peculiarity of Amazon Payments is a pleasant interface and vast possibilities. The company accepts payments in all major currencies, and the service works with all credit cards and is available to all devices.

How to choose a payment gateway and not make a fatal mistake?

As you may have guessed, the first step of choosing the payment gateway will be the precise determination of exactly which gateway you need, hosted or integrated.

We also recommend that you consider several important factors:

• A high level of data security. If the payment gateway you choose does not provide the proper level of customer data protection, all other factors do not matter.
• Convenience and ease of use. Mainly it refers to the use of mobile devices since most parts of payments are performed with the help of smartphones.
• Worldwide coverage. You can never know for sure from which country customers will want to use your goods. That’s why there should be no restrictions.
• Fees. No matter how convenient and functional the payment gateway is, if you have to pay too much for it, think about whether you need it.

Ask the company right away what will be included in the cost of using the payment gateway. You may pay transaction fees, registration fees, and gateway fees every month. Also, find out if you will be charged for the integration process itself.

Payment Gateway Integration Process

Each payment gateway connects differently with its specifics. However, some steps are common to all of them.

For example, choosing a hosted gateway, you will need to connect your site to the gateway, and in addition, you will need to get an SSL certificate. You will also need to get a unique secret key, MWS access key, vendor ID. It will take a lot of time to configure, but the result will be exactly what you expect.

The first thing you need to do when choosing an integrated gateway is to check and verify all security measures. To do this, you will need to use modules and APIs. Some payment providers assist merchants in being PCI DSS compliant.

In addition, you will need to check that the payment gateway allows accepting payments by all popular methods and test the payment process using a smartphone and make sure that your users will not have any problems if they choose this method.