Merchant Payment Gateway

The meaning of payment gateway is a link between the Payment Processor and your Web site (or the Web site your goods are hosted on). When your customer makes an online purchase, the information from your Web site must be sent through a payment gateway before an authorization is obtained. After the authorization is obtained, the Payment Processor must transfer any funds through the payment gateway.

Most of the people out there are probably still convinced that using credit cards over the Web is extremely risky, it's very important for you to make sure that your online sales system is as secure as practical, and to convince your site visitors of this fact. By taking a few simple precautions, you can make it difficult enough to breach your security. If somebody wants to run a credit card rip-off, there are far easier ways to do it than hacking into a site that has taken basic security precautions.

Usually the shopping cart collects items from your customer, adds up the item's costs, calculates taxes and shipping costs, and provides a total amount to the customer. A payment gateway's function is to collect the purchaser's name, address, credit card number, and expiration date. The payment gateway securely sends this information and verifies that the purchaser has enough funds in their account to pay for products ordered and that those funds may be deposited into the merchant's account.

There are several systems you can use to make your ordering page secure, but the most popular is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is supported by all major browsers, and by most ISPs. Using a secure Web protocol such as SSL has two main goals.

The first is to encrypt the credit card data being transmitted, so that it would be very difficult for a third party to decipher. And the other one is to certify that the message is in fact coming from where it claims to be coming from, so that it would be very difficult for a third party to forge a transaction. This is done by means of a digital certificate. Ensure all transactions are sent using a Secured Virtual Network and only transactions originated from merchant IP address are validated, which is a very strong protection against hackers.