I need some guidance on payment gateways

Question

I've never done anything with payment gateways, can anybody give me suggestions?

Answer 1

Well, decide on a payment gateway you want to work with. If you're just looking to learn about this online, I'd recommend going with PayPal's payment gateway. They really don't give good rates (they take a big bite out of the money you charge users), but they have a nice "sandbox" system which you can switch on and off, and it's free to develop with. This lets you run your system as if everything was "live":

• Money will get credited to your sandbox account from the fake credit cards that you create
• Transactions will act just like the live system: you'll get confirmations and notifications just like it was real.

So a good place to start for that would be PayPal's developer site.

Oh, don't be afraid to use some other gateway - all the ones I've used have a way to test their system before it goes live. But many of them do not allow switching back to a "fake" simulation mode after it's gone live. So adding and testing new features after you got a production system is trickier.

Answer 2

Hi Jarus

Payment gateways differ from country to country and they are agencies who can enable payment processing in your applications.

For example. in UK BT has it payment gateway. They call it BTBuynet . In India ICICI is one of the major payment gateway providers. You can also check out paypal.

Each of them have their own way of implementation. Usually every payment gateways have 2 modes for payment processing.

1. Payment page : This is one of the most commonly used. Sites usually redirect the user to the pay page hosted by the payment gateway. This type has some advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

We dont have to worry about validating or storing cards details as everything is taken care by their pay page.

Disadvantages

Since we redirect the user to a different site the look and feel of the site will be different.

1. Payment service : This is the second type in which usually a component or API is used. ard details are collected by the merchant (The application owner) and sent for payment processing.

Hope this gives yo some idea about payment gateways. You can also check out some related questions in the RHS.

Answer 3

For South Africa we use Moneybookers or Setcom, for accepting most payments I suggest Paypal since its widely use there are also other payment gateways.

Answer 4

Am I right in thinking you are situated down under? If so I am currently working on a PHP ecommerce site in Oz. We are using Payment Express http://www.paymentexpress.com/ . As other have pointed out they offer several integration options:

1. Iframe/re-direct - This is quite straight forwards to integrate. You just post a bunch of stuff to them and they will post back a bunch of stuff to say it the transaction completed or not
2. webservice - Uses an xml webservice which is pretty well documented and dead easy to implement. I guess this option is a little more complex than the iframe option but it allows for more control over what happens during the transactions. But you need to be a little more wary of how process people credit card details

The client actually chose Payment express not us directly so my recommendations are based on actually coding the interface. Their specs and sample code are freely available on their website without registering.

Hope you find this helpful.