What Is a Credit Card Payment Gateway?

An e-commerce credit card payment gateway is a crucial component to the online payment process, as is the system that transmits the customer’s payment from the e-commerce website to the merchant processor. The online payment gateway works much like credit card terminals do at retail establishments.

How an Online Payment Gateway Works

An online credit card transaction begins with the e-commerce sale: Either through a secure hosted payment form on the merchant’s website, or through an integrated shopping cart, where the customer enters his or her credit card information and hits “Submit Order” or a similar button. Once encrypted, the payment makes its way to the payment gateway, which forwards the information to the merchant bank’s processor. From there, the payment continues on through the credit card network and the customer’s credit card issuing bank for authorization.  

Benefits of the Online Payment Gateway

As the power and convenience of the Internet continues to rapidly evolve, merchants who wish to expand their business and increase profits through online transactions must invest in a secure payment gateway. The payment gateway allows merchants to accept credit cards, debit cards as well as ACH payments online. Additional features of BluePay’s secure payment gateway include recurring billing, transaction reporting tools, tokenization, secure hosted payment forms, fraud filters, batch uploading, returns, voids, Level 2 processing, accounting software integration and more. 

PCI Compliant Online Payment Gateway

PCI compliance is required for every merchant accepting credit cards for business, whether you’re doing business online or face-to-face. For e-commerce merchants especially, advanced security tools are necessary for protecting business, as electronic theft has become more complex. BluePay’s secure payment gateway features include secure hosted payment forms, which are hosted on our secure servers to reduce merchants’ liability. In addition, tokenization replaces account information with “tokens” to ensure sensitive data is never stored.

BluePay Is Your One-Source Solution

At BluePay, we make it easy to accept online payments, no matter what your business needs and goals. We combine our full suite of credit card processing products, including ACH payment processing, mobile credit card processing, Interactive Voice Response and more, with a secure online payment gateway. That means we’re both the merchant processor and the gateway, offering all-in-one services that eliminate the need to manage multiple accounts or receive multiple statements. With BluePay, there is just one company to call when you have questions or issues, and as a leading authority in credit card processing, you can be sure we’ve got the solution for you.