Whether you are an eCommerce platform owner or just maintaining your online presence, you want to offer your customers a safe, quick, and easy-to-use payment system. The chosen payment solution has to satisfy both the needs of your customers and your business. So, it has to be protected from fraud, support a variety of payment methods, be convenient to use, and compatible with your platform.

To accept electronic payments and be able to process credit or debit cards, a merchant uses a payment gateway. Choosing the right payment gateway determines the currencies you can accept, the transaction fee, how fast money gets in your merchant account, and the payment methods you’ll offer.

A payment gateway is a service that authorizes and processes payments in online and brick-and-mortar stores. A gateway serves as a portal to facilitate transaction flow between customers and merchants. It uses security protocols and encryption to pass the transaction data safely. The data is transferred from websites/application/mobile devices to payment processors/banks and back.

The infrastructure of online payment processing is a little bit more complicated than you might imagine. For the customer, it’s represented by a small window, or a separate website, where they have to pass through the checkout. But actually, processing involves several financial institutions, or tools, verifying the transaction data on both ends, allowing the customer to complete the purchase in a few seconds.