What Is A Payment Gateway?
January 12, 2009
When you’re a business with a presence online, you need to be sure that you’re aware of how to keep your customers’ information secure. In this time of identity theft and missing records, you can not afford to be anything less. In order to assure your customers (and yourself) that your payment acceptance policies are secure, you need to learn more about what happens one the customer types in their credit card number.
Once your customer gives you their credit card information, it goes to the merchant account in order to be verified and then the funds will be transferred to your business account. However, to be sure that you are giving the merchant account the proper information, you will want to consider the idea of a payment gateway. A payment gateway is a separate service that acts as a ‘middleman’ between the customer and the merchant account provider. The gateway service will check the information that has been given to them to be sure that it is accurate before sending it to the merchant account provider. It will then encrypt the details of that transaction and send them along to the merchant account provider. Details are then unencrypted in order to show the customers the details of their purchase.
Customers will not even be aware of this process as they are making their purchases. If something goes wrong in the purchase, they will be alerted to the error and asked to resubmit their information or asked to call customers service to straighten out any problems in the transaction. The data from the customer’s transaction is forwarded to the payment gateway within a secure connection, in line with the chosen gateway’s format.
Just as with any other business tool, you will want to make sure that you are comparing various payment gateway options before settling on one for your particular business. There are a number of options that are readily available for you to use, but their methods and shopping cart infrastructures may be different and may not be immediately compatible with your shopping cart system. Speaking with the payment gateway provider will allow you to better match what you have with what the provider can do for you. Most are quite willing to help you setup any program that is desired by you, even helping at no additional charge.
You will want to make sure that the payment gateway provider is able to offer address verification services in order to reduce the possibility of fraudulent usage. These services will check the billing address and residential address for the credit card and match it with the given address in the transaction. If the two do not match, the transaction will be halted until they do – depending on your security needs.
A payment gateway is another way for you to make sure that you are getting paid for services or products that you are offering to your customers – and that peace of mind is priceless.
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