E-commerce and payments
What is Payment gateway?
A payment gateway authorises and processes card payments between your store, the customer’s bank and yours. The practical differences between providers are supported countries, accepted business categories, fee structure and how well the developer tooling works.
Also called: payment processor · PSP
What to check before choosing
- Does it support your country as a merchant? This eliminates options faster than any feature comparison
- Does it accept your business category? Restricted categories are refused after onboarding surprisingly often
- What are the fees, including currency conversion and chargeback handling?
- How long until payout, which matters more to cash flow than the percentage does
- Does it support the payment methods your market actually uses?
The risk nobody scopes
An account frozen or closed after onboarding, because the business turned out to be in a restricted category or triggered a risk review. It is worth confirming acceptance in writing before building the integration, not after.
Ownership
The account must be in your business name with your bank details. A developer or agency holding the payment account is not a technical arrangement; it is a commercial hostage situation waiting to happen.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. E-commerce website development: what the whole build actually involves covers this properly — 7 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.