A payment gateway allows you to accept online and traditional face-to-face sales, charging your customer’s credit, debit or gift cards and checking accounts. This payment gateway is invisible to your customers and operates behind-the-scenes to process and validate payments.
Using secure communication methods and tokenization, payment gateways communicate between your online store/website or business and your bank. Customer data is collected, validated, approved, and then the payment is accepted, debiting the customer’s account. This is all done in a secure and expedient manner, ensuring that your customers feel 100 percent comfortable with the online payment process.
When researching payment gateways, it’s important to select a payment gateway that supports global worldwide processing networks. This allows you to ensure uptime and protects your revenue while minimizing processing costs through intelligent and flexible transaction routing. The Verifi platform supports a global payment network including a wide range of domestic, international, and ACH/eCheck processing networks.
Q. How does the payment gateway work?
The payment gateway is responsible for a number of key tasks that ensure your customer transactions are safe, valid, and secure. During the transaction process, the payment gateway does the following seamlessly and quickly for both you and your customer:
- The payment gateway receives encrypted data from your web server and then sends this data to your bank’s payment processor.
- The payment processor then forwards the transaction information to the card (credit, debit, or gift) association. The issuing bank for this card then reviews the authorization request and either approves or denies the request.
- The payment processor receives this information and then sends the authorization request (approved or denied) to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then relays this information to your web server where it is interpreted and a response is displayed to your customer.
- Assuming the order has been approved, your website then processes and fills the order. This could be for example, providing a download link for software, delivering a book to a tablet, or alerting sales staff that an item must be packaged and prepared for shipping.
While this appears to be a long process, it actually happens in mere seconds and your customer is essentially unaware that so many behind-the-scenes transactions and reviews are occurring. The speed and efficiency inherent with a proven payment gateway helps to give your customers confidence with the safety of completing an online transaction through your website.
Q. What should I be looking for in a payment gateway?
You want and need a payment gateway that meets the following requirements:
Top-level security.
Our PCI Level 1 certified payment gateway; Transaction Tokenization and Vault Storage allows you to support recurring payments to give cardholders the ability to enter card information once and store this data for future and recurring transactions.
We protect your sensitive data with tokenization, safely storing your customer’s credit card and personal information and returning a token back to you for future processing needs.
Comprehensive and layered fraud protection across the entire transaction lifecycle.
Easily and quickly accept or decline transactions with our robust rules engine. This allows you to configure pre-set business or custom rules, saving you the time it takes to manually assess risk tolerance.
The Global Payment Gateway easily integrates with Verifi’s suite of payments protection solutions, providing insights and in-depth reporting on trends and risks in your business – from global business to marketing and affiliate partners.
Flexible user management and controls and easy-to-use virtual terminal.
Verifi’s Virtual Terminal enables your customers to manually authorize, process, and manage credit card transactions from any computer or mobile browsing device with Internet access. Merchants operating multiple branches or locations are able to control access and permissions on a per user and per location basis.
For example, a customer may want to control the permissions of call center staff members to only permit the processing of sales but not refund transactions; alternatively, a business operating multiple branches may need to restrict transaction processing capabilities for each individual branch to the merchant account specific to the individual branch. Either of these situations are easily managed through the intuitive Verifi platform.
Connectivity to all major domestic and international acquirer processing networks and multi-currency support for international processing.
Verifi’s PCI Level 1 certified payment gateway enables connectivity to all the major domestic and international acquirer processing networks, enabling global payment acceptance across all major international and domestic payment types and currencies.
Customized billing using dynamic descriptors.
Verifi supports dynamic descriptors, allowing you to place custom, descriptive text on your customer’s credit card billing statement. Our dynamic descriptors are completely flexible so you can place a unique statement relating to a particular product or membership, such as a specific customer service 800 number, on each transaction processed.
Two methods of transaction processing: real-time API or batch submission.
Verifi’s API transaction processing offers you real-time authorization results which are ideal for high and low volume call centers and eCommerce operations that require a real-time response. The API integration method offers the highest level of secure transaction infrastructure available, using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) digital certificate technology. SSL technology is used to establish a secure connection to safeguard payment data in transit to our Payment Gateway.
Our batch upload method offers the same level of encrypted security as the API, but caters to merchants who need to submit a large volume of transactions in bulk that do not require a real-time response for processing. Batch uploads are typically utilized to process recurring charges for subscription customers or to capture funds from previously authorized transactions once a product has been shipped. Either through delivery to our SFTP or via upload through our secure web interface, batch files may be delivered to Verifi through the most customer-convenient method.