What are Payment Gateways and How Can They Help You Get Paid

Supporting Contributor Post by Jenna

One of the main challenges for an online retail site owner is how to receive and keep track of payments. This is a critical question because that is why you have your online store; to make money. But how do you receive the money in your bank account? This is where payment gateways like Checkout.com come into the picture. They will help you with receiving payments, withdrawing it to your bank accounts, view monthly reports, and more.

Definition of Payment Gateways

Payment gateways are like merchant gateways that are owned and operated by a third party company, to help in ecommerce. Payment gateways authorize credit card processing for sending and receiving payments. They work by facilitating communication between servers to help transfer information from the payment portal, such as a website, and the front end payment processor, in this case, a bank.

Transaction Process

The first thing that should happen in order to initiate the whole process is that a client wants to send you money for the work that you have done for him or a product he’s buying. When you have created an account on a reputable payment gateway of your choice, you provide the client your email ID and account number in which the amount is required to be deposited.

The client will make payment using his credit card of choice which can be a Mastercard, Visa, Maestro, American Express, Discover, JCB, or any other depending on his location and banking company. You’ll receive the payment in your online account, and receive a notification via email or SMS or both as per your settings.

You can now withdraw the amount from your online account to your preferred bank account for a nominal processing fee. The whole process is really very simple and requires little to no intervention on your part once your account is opened and verified.

You can also include a payment gateway button on your personal or professional website or any other page to which you may have access.

Advantages to Payment Gateways

There are several advantages of using a professional payment gateway system. One of the biggest advantages of using a payment gateway is that you will no longer miss out on opportunities because you were unable to accept payment from a client.

Further, globalization is already here, and there is no guarantee as to where your client may be residing. She may be a citizen of Kenya, Greece, India, US, Honduras, or Japan. In such a case, it is important that you have an account at a payment gateway that offers integration with all the major credit cards, alternative payments, and local payments across the majority of the countries to stay ahead of the competition. This way you are ensuring that you will never lose out on a project for this reason.

Another major benefit of using a payment gateway is that you will be able to receive money in multiple currencies and not just dollars. If your client is from Dubai, then she is going to pay you money in AED, which makes it important that you should be able to accept it and process it.

You may have a client that is being charged on a recurring basis. This means that the client is going to pay you a fixed amount for services rendered or work done every month. With a payment gateway, you can set up a recurring transaction account that will help you in automating the whole process. Once the setup is done, and the first payment is received, the payment gateway will automatically send notification and collect money from your client without your intervention. This means one less thing for you to worry about.

It is also critical to know and understands how much money you have received and what your current financial position is. A payment gateway will allow you to download various reports of your financial activity for a week, month, year, or any other custom or designated period that you have entered. This means real time data for you to compare your performance, productivity, output, and so on and it will also help in the decision-making process. Your own decision-making process.

Finally, payment gateways can usually integrate with shopping cart programs and services.