E-Commerce Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is a service that will allow you to accept payments from customers. It authorizes visitors and processes transactions on their cards (both debit and credit). The gateway must ensure the smooth passage of all transactions so that, as a result, funds for the goods purchased on your site are credited to your account. It is easy to understand that inside the gateway, the user’s confidential data must be encrypted in order to transfer it in the required format from your portal to the payment processor (to the bank).

The gateway not only provides the possibility of making a payment – its task is to facilitate the “financial connection” between your website, the buyer’s bank (from which the transfer will be made using his card) and your own credit institution, where this money will be credited. Of course, safety is paramount here. And it provides an encryption module, which not only needs to have the necessary certification, but it also needs to be correctly installed and configured. You need in services for developing e-commerce payment gateway.

OnePix specialists have all the necessary competencies to compile and configure the processing software node (this is another name for the payment gateway). However, it seems reasonable to consider this system in more detail, focusing on its main characteristics. This is necessary so that you can correctly assess your own strengths when deciding how to create a gateway.

What to look for when choosing ecommerce payment gateway?

The system that processes payments on your site should be consistent with the business model you have formed. The point is that the final amount payable can be composite and depend on many parameters. The processing platform should be able to correctly and visually calculate it.

What you need to pay attention to when choosing services for developing e-commerce payment gateway:

1. System scalability. It must have the ability to increase productivity. At the start of your project, perhaps 1 transaction per minute will be enough (also not bad). But if your business grows, it is quite possible that the number of transactions will exceed 20 units per second. And the processing system is obliged to cope with this flow of transfers without interruption. Replacing a payment gateway is always a very big problem for the owner of an online store, since his resource will be forced to be disabled for some time.
2. Functional extensibility. This means the ability to add new features to the processing system that increase its performance. In particular, we can talk about the processing of additional payment methods, the addition of certain forms of reporting, online payments, domestic transaction, international transactions, alternative payment methods, other service modules and payment options. It is very important to foresee this at a very early stage so as not to subsequently switch to another payment gateway. OnePix software developers place particular emphasis on the potential associated with functionality. Let payment gateways work not too fast, but it must have the ability to upgrade.
3. Continuity of work. Unfortunately, it is impossible to ensure the complete absence of any failures in the payment gateway system in ecommerce industry. However, it is not possible to do without technical payment gateway support at all. In general, the processing service should work 99.99% of the time, which means that technical customer support (services online) should function 24 hours, 7 days a week. At the same time, of course, DevOps engineers must be present in the state, who have the technical capabilities to ensure its sustainability.

Challenges faced by the developer

If your project initially does not provide for a high volume of payments, then it will require a minimum of options, which means that there will be no problems with setting up. However, if the business scales up in the future, the number of transactions will multiply, every time you have to add new payment method, on and on, as online payment function from other countries and alternative payment options will need to be accepted. In a place with this, the number of nuances and difficult moments that will need to be addressed will increase. Let’s analyze them sequentially.

Connecting to the API

To the great regret of the developers it is impossible to connect to the API of the processing service by making some minor change to program code of any payment gateway option. Here it is required to take into account the peculiarities of payment process and information exchange: whether the receipt of money is confirmed or not, whether there was a disconnect or everything went smoothly. Absolutely all the nuances will have to be taken into account, because the customers need the stable operation of the gateway under any external circumstances.

Connecting a processing service is objectively difficult. And even a team of experienced developers (such as OnePix specialists) can take up to 3 weeks to complete this. That’s why our programmers pay special attention to this, so that the connection is made without problems.

Design an online payment system

Commissions for different banks and payment systems vary. Of course, the customer is interested in processing fees at the lowest rates, but in order to ensure this, one has to resort to artificial routing. However, one payment gateway provider interacts better with domestic transactions, another processing service is specializing on international payments – their currency conversion fee is the lowest one. And the most popular payment gateway providers generally guarantee better commissions when interacting with any payment network (international fees per transaction here are the least ones). Therefore, several processing services must be connected to the gateway at once. Organizing multiple gateways on the site at once is an extremely difficult event, after all, because of setup expenses at least.

OnePix specialists use an additional software “layer” in order to determine the source of the payment. So you can choose the best rate of processing fees. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the chosen route may not always be beneficial for the processing company, which is interested in ecommerce sites paying the highest possible gateway fees. In order not to encounter a direct ban, the software module must be able to initially determine the route of the funds in order to guarantee the highest speed and reliability of the transaction.

Router development is universal, reliable “payment solution”. It’s not that important for a mobile ecommerce with a small payment flow. However, if this is a development store on marketplace then it is strongly recommended to foresee it initially, since it will be much more difficult and expensive to integrate it later. Best payment gateways includes such modules from the very beginning.

Designing electronic payment system

The buyer just fills in the fields with his card data and clicks “Pay”, but a lot of online transactions take place inside the payment gateway. All of them must flow clearly, consistently and without delay. Only in this case it will be possible to say that the payment gateway works without failures.

Here is a rough list of these “events”:

• the processing company requests the buyer’s bank and receives transaction data from it;
• the bank contacts the hosted payment service of the point of sale;
• the state of payer merchant accounts, the processing center and the bank serving the online store is updated with the corresponding SMS sent to user accounts. After that checkout process starts.

For the client all these Shopify payments of order management should take less than a second – pressing a button, paying, checking an updated invoice. OnePix specialists pay a lot of attention to the resource intensity of the payment gateway being designed, since the speed of its operation directly depends on this.

The best payment gateway integration process

You need to understand that the most payment gateways options are the separate software modules (like a plug-in) that is built into the architecture of the developed ecommerce site and increases its functionality (now it becomes possible to make online purchases on the resource, and not just look at the product). However, it should be noted that this special “software application” is not cheap, which means that there will be a lot of people who want to optimize their costs, especially in a small businesses environment. We will tell you what options exist for this and try to choose the most reasonable way to acquire a payment gateway. It should be noted right away that all the methods discussed below have been encountered by OnePix programmers more than once, so the conclusion is so categorical.

Modul producing at payment gateway software development company

The more in demand a computer program (or a separate module), the more expensive it is. This is probably the most expensive way to get services for developing e-commerce payment gateway. This is a law to remember, when applying for some kind of software product to the open market. And do not think that professional developers will “pity” you and give you a discount.

Here it is worth proceeding from a different point: as a rule, if you already have some kind of commercial Internet resource, then you also have a development team that created it. Imagine that you will create a processing system on your own – and so third-party professionals will charge you much more than you can spend in the process of your own development. After all, one should not forget about the high rate of return adopted in the IT industry.

Rent a payment gateway for ecommerce website

Renting a processing system is a very non-trivial move. In short, it is fast, efficient, and at first glance, not very expensive. However, any lease is a rent, that is, an expense item that will not be connected in any way with your revenue or the accumulated total margin. Sales may not go as intensively as indicated in your forecasts, that is, instead of 2-3 per minute there will be 1 in 5 minutes, but you will have to pay for the rental of the gateway at the full rental rate. You should not out of the blue add risk to your business project by increasing the items of protected expenses. OnePix financial managers categorically advise against doing this.

Payment gateway purchase

Buying is always good: you get a finished product, you don’t have to pay anything after that, you have a working software module. The only bad thing is that the cost of the processing system can be a sum with a large number of zeros. In addition, you should not discount the configuration, debugging, and setup fees in order for the processing module to meet all your requirements.

Development by hired specialists from OnePix

Many get lost looking at the deadline for launching an online store, for example, and evaluating current results. Independent development in this case seems to be something that cannot be handled under any circumstances. And this is the main mistake.

Simply hire a team of highly qualified, competent developers from OnePix, and you will receive required services for developing e-commerce payment gateway. The result will be ready in time and at a very reasonable price. Conclude smart contracts with selected specialists and specify in them the obligations of the parties, guarantees, all your requirements (for example, the mandatory annual PCI DSS certification of the processing system), as well as the terms of remuneration – in a mandatory connection to the finished result.

As our rich practice shows, this is the most effective way to create and run any software package. And this is reasonable: if you want something to work, entrust the creation of it to professionals! We are looking forward to establishing long-term cooperation with you.