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How do I choose a payment gateway?

Modified 20:26, 26 Apr 2012 by melanie.dolgachev | Page History
  1. 1. Overview
  2. 2. Solution
    1. 2.1. What Features Do You Need?
    2. 2.2. Getting Started with Payment Gateways
  3. 3. Related

Overview

A critical piece of the billing and commerce puzzle is signing up with a payment gateway. These are the companies that will help you connect your virtual shopping cart or virtual terminal/POS to the payments infrastructure that facilitates payments made with either a credit card company or bank network. 

The trick is, there are many gateway providers to choose from. Zuora has pre-integrated with the most popular gateways on the market. So which one is right for you? Like many things, it depends on your requirements.

Solution

Choosing the right gateway depends on a number of factors.  Providers differ in several dimensions, from rates charged and fee structures, to countries and currencies they serve, to the number of additional services they offer, to the level of effort required to get them up and running.

What Features Do You Need?

We often find that smaller companies don't need a lot of fancy features; they just want to pay a fair rate and get up and running quickly to start processing credit cards. As companies grow and start to expand internationally, they consider switching or signing up with another processor for international customers. As you start getting into higher volumes, it can be advantageous to shop around for better rates and to start looking into additional features like credit card updaters or fraud and chargeback protection. One of the key advantages of working with Zuora is that you have the flexibility to quickly switch gateways and processors as your needs change. You also have the flexibility of using more than one payment gateway. For example, you might want to use one payment gateway for customers based in the United States and another payment gateway for International customers.

Zuora can talk you through the right option for your company to help you get the most value while keeping down costs. 

Getting Started with Payment Gateways

To get started, log a request with Zuora Global Support and provide your response to the following questions:

  • Where are you (the merchant) officially domiciled (which country)? 
  • In which countries do you plan to sell your services?
  • What type of credit cards do you need to accept?
  • What other payment methods do you need to accept? For example: PayPal, Direct Debit (ACH).
    • If Direct Debit, in which countries will you support direct debit? 
  • What currencies do you need to sell within?
  • What currencies do you need to process payments in? 
  • What currencies do you payments to settle in? 
  • What other gateway functionality do you require? (Fraud services, AVS Checking, Chargeback Management)
  • Do you have charge back issues? What is your approximate rate of charge backs?
  • How much volume (revenue) do you currently push through the gateway annually? If you're just starting to collect payments, how much do you expect to push through annually?
  • Do you process only card not present (internet/online) transactions or do you require card present (retail) transactions?

Zuora will evaluate your responses and provide you with a list of payment gateway and/or payment processing providers that meet your requirements. We will put you in touch with the right people at various providers to have follow on conversations. We recommend speaking directly with these providers to evaluate the best option for your business.

Related

Topics
Payment Method
Zuora offers three payment method options: Z-Payment Method, External Payment Method, or None. See Payment Methods for more information.
Configure Payment Method Retry Rules
Zuora allows you to retry payments on a scheduled basis by using scheduled payment runs which will process any invoices that have not been fully paid for customers who have auto-pay enabled. You can also specify the maximum number of consecutive times a failed payment method (for example, credit card) is retried for payment, as well as the ability to define a time period to not retry a payment. For instance if you define the interval as 8 hours, an automated payment retry will not attempt a payment if the last failed payment was less than 8 hours ago.
Payment Methods
The payment method refers to the form of payment customers are using. For online purchases, they usually take the form of electronic payments like credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, third-party processors (such as Paypal), or non-electronic payments like checks and cash.  The customer's method of payment can be created and edited in the customer account. To learn more, and to configure payment methods, see Define Payment Methods.
Supported Payment Methods
This topic describes the payment methods supported by the payment gateways. Empty fields in the tables indicate that the payment method is not supported by that payment gateway.
Direct Debit for GlobalCollect
Direct debit is a way of collecting funds for a payment directly from a customer’s bank account. It is a very common method of payment in many countries and is frequently used for payment of utilities (such as telephone bills) or mortgage which occur on a recurring basis.
Implementing Direct Debit with GlobalCollect
Although direct debit is treated like any other electronic payment method in Zuora, there are additional steps that you need to perform to implement this payment method. These topics provide an overview of implementing and managing direct debit transactions using the Zuora-GlobalCollect integration. During your integration please contact your GlobalCollect integration manager or Zuora Global Support for assistance.Your GlobalCollect integration manager will provide you documentation and guides to implement direct debit for the specific countries you want to support. For example, direct debit in the United Kingdon has different rules and regulations than direct debit in Germany.
Direct Debit Mandates
Unlike credit cards, you (the merchant) must obtain authorization from your customers to debit their bank account for payment. This authorization can be a confirmation page on the your web store in which authorization is confirmed by your customer when they accept your stated terms and conditions. Alternatively, the authorization can be provided using a signed agreement called a mandate.
Obtaining and Processing Mandates
Mandates are obtained and maintained by you (the merchant) and not by Zuora or your payment services provider, GlobalCollect. The mandate information along with your customer’s bank account information is submitted to GlobalCollect with each payment transaction request.
Retaining Mandates
You, the merchant, are required to keep a mandate up to date for as long as you continue to debit your customer’s account.
Customer Notifications for Direct Debit
Some countries require you, the merchant, to provide the customer with advance notice before debiting the customer's account for payment, while other countries may not require it but consider it a best practice. Advance notice is especially important when the recurring fees have changed, for example, the customer purchased an additional product this month.
Payment Gateways
A payment gateway is an online service provider that connects an electronic shopping cart or virtual terminal/POS to an electronic payment processor. It is your gateway to the rest of the payments infrastructure that allows you to accept electronic forms of payment. The main function of a gateway is to pass authorization and settlement data securely to and from the merchant's website to the merchant's processor. The merchant processor in turn connects to the card association (or "network"), which connects to the card issuing bank. The articles in this section explain more about the participants in the payments ecosystem, and put gateways in the right context.
The Payments Value Chain
The payments ecosystem is very fragmented, due to a high degree of specialization, and any given payment transaction typically passes through at least five or six different parties, which we may call the payments value chain. See the following sections to learn about the various participants in the payments ecosystem, and the sometimes subtle differences in their functions.
Supported Payment Gateways
Zuora currently supports the following payment gateways: Authorize.net  Chase Paymentech Orbital (Salem Platform) Chase Paymentech Spectrum (controlled release) CyberSource  GlobalCollect Litle  Merchant e-Solutions  Moneris (eSelectPLUS Canada) PayPal Adaptive Payments PayPal Payflow Pro Verifi  Note: Support for the Chase Paymentech Spectrum is a Controlled Release feature, and is a premium service offered by Zuora. Contact Zuora Global Support for information about using this payment gateway.
Managing Payment Gateways
After you are done selecting a payment gateway, you will need to do a certain amount of configuring in order to set up your gateway and get going with accepting payments. This section of the documentation will guide you through configuring common Zuora-supported payment gateways, then going live with these gateways, and even disabling and troubleshooting if things go wrong. Finally, we will show you when you might need to use multiple payment gateways, and how to make it work.
Required Configuration Fields By Gateway
You can set up Z-Payments to use one preferred payment gateway. Because each gateway has different requirements, the setup screen for each of these payment gateways varies. Contact your payment gateway to obtain the information required to configure the gateway in Zuora.
Verify Credit Card Gateway Options
Z-Payments provides options to verify new and updated credit cards. These settings are applied at the gateway level, and can be different for different gateways, but they apply to all cards that are authorized through that gateway.
Tutorials
Troubleshooting
References
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