A payment gateway is the service that authorises card payments for an online business. It is the equivalent of the card terminal in a shop, and choosing the right one has a direct effect on both your costs and the number of customers who complete a purchase.
The terminology causes a lot of confusion, so it is worth separating out.
The gateway takes the card details from your checkout and passes them securely for authorisation. The merchant account is where the money lands before it is settled to your bank. The acquirer is the bank behind that account.
Some providers give you all three in one product with a single application and a single percentage fee, which is why they are popular with smaller stores. Others give you the gateway only and expect you to hold a separate merchant account, which usually works out cheaper at higher volumes but takes more setting up.
Hosted or redirect. The customer is sent to the provider’s own payment page and returned to your site afterwards. Simplest to implement and it keeps card data entirely away from your server, which substantially reduces your PCI scope. The trade off is that the customer leaves your site at the most sensitive moment.
Embedded fields. The payment form appears within your checkout but the fields themselves are hosted by the provider. The customer never leaves your site and card data still never touches your server. For most stores this is now the right default.
Direct or server to server. Card details are posted to your server and forwarded to the gateway. This gives complete control over the checkout but puts you squarely in scope for full PCI DSS compliance, which is a serious ongoing obligation. We rarely recommend it.
Most e-commerce packages ship with a handful of gateways built in, usually the largest international providers, plus a selection aimed at the software’s home market. Every country also has its own regional providers, often with better rates for local businesses, and these are frequently not supported out of the box.
This is where our experience helps. We have worked with a large number of gateways from around the world, we can advise on which suits your specific business, help with the sign up process, and implement and test the integration properly before you go live. We have written gateway modules for a range of shopping cart applications covering just about every country in the world, so if the provider you want is not supported, that is a solvable problem rather than a reason to choose a different provider.
We also test properly. A payment integration that has only ever been tried with a single successful sandbox transaction is not tested. Declines, timeouts, refunds, partial refunds and the customer who closes the browser mid-payment all need to behave correctly, because each one of them will happen.
Whatever we recommend, it is based on what suits your business rather than on any commission arrangement. If your existing gateway is the right one, we will tell you that too.