ALL ABOUT PAYMENT GATEWAYS

Payment gateways work as a middle layer between a portal and the bank. In other words, it is through these online payment gateways that credit card payments are done online. To an extent, payment gateways are equivalent to the credit card processing terminals in shops.

Payment gateways have become crucial for online businesses, especially websites that directly sell commodities to customers – such as eBay - and service/advertising oriented portals. Its advantages are manifold. Firstly, having an online payment gateway ensures lesser operating costs in terms of less number of personnel. It virtually does the job of a billing counter clerk. Secondly, anyone can access and use the online payment gateway to make the payments at any time of his/her convenience, and from any place on this globe. In other words, there is no fixed working hours with payment gateways. It works 24x7. Thirdly, it is real time – the customers could know if their credit card payments has been accepted or not – is secure – no room for hacking - and offers charge back facility.

Payment gateways usually come in these two forms or architecture - a secure order form or a merchant side application, hosted in the same server. The former takes the customers to a third party secured environment – that of a credit card company or payment service provider – to make the payments, while in the latter case, to a merchant-side application program interface (here, the credit card processing code is integrated into the server hosting the merchant-side application). The former is however the safer of the designs.

From a customer point of view, before revealing their credit card numbers to any website, it is imperative that they check and verify the authenticity and security of the online payment gateway they are interacting with. There could be fraudulent ones around put up with the sole purpose of stealing the private details of the customers and nothing else. In order to discern chalk from cheese, some education in the same could come really handy.

Here are some security features that really work and something that genuine online merchants with credit card transacting features employ in their portals.

1. Dynamic IP Protection: The system verifies the IP the same IP used in the previous successful session for any further online money transfer request. 2. Digital Signature: This is the safest bet. Digital signature ensures that the system is hack proof, even if the id has been hacked. From a user point of view, one should opt for an online payment gateway for sure if it offers digital signature. 3. 128-bit security with SSL: This method ensures that the financial transactions are encrypted from the user browser – whichever it is – with a 128 bit encryption key.

All popular websites have genuine payment gateways. However, be careful with newer/less popular ones.

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