Integrating a payment gateway it’s a painful process.
I remember first time I wanted to develop a payment gateway to pay in our web. Was a final project for my studies back in 2001 and was developed in ASP. The software was for the family business The Best Tapas Bar of Barcelona, La Taberna de Alibaba (end of publicity).
The site will have a public part where the menu was displayed the history, and will let you register and book table if there was any available.
In 2002 the business was going crazily good in the restaurant so we used to ask to the customers for an advance payment before they booked. So I start wondering how to implement the payment gateway also in the website. I didn’t manage to find a proper cheap solution. I mean was 2002 I was just 18 years old and we didn’t even have proper internet connection, so yes banks were laughing at me…
Since then almost at any company I worked we used different methods to get paid:
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SMS
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Phone Call
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Bank Transfer
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Card Payments
And almost in all of them we struggled with same problems:
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Difficult to open an account
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Poor written API
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Impossible to test (or almost)
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Expensive chargeback
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Expensive commissions from 3% to 5%
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Not great support
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Multi currency problems (Currency conversions, etc..)
Still nowadays every time I need to start getting paid in a web I get anxious…I know what’s gonna happen and it’s going to hurt. I had that feeling back in 2000’s every time I was installing a printer without drivers xD
What should I do?
It really depends the kind of business you are or you want to run.
Do it yourself
- I don’t think is a great idea. Complicated and expensive to implement
- Security
- SSL
- PCI compliant, dedicated hardware + isolated etc..
- Payment processor
What’s the future?
Luckily and not thanks to banks there’s plenty of new companies offering the payment gateway integration with a really simple API and less pain integration. Companies like Stripe, Paymill, Braintree, WePay etc. are getting every time stronger and more common.
I hope bank realize the need of internet sales and upgrade their old system for something that can work better for all of us.
Trick
If you need to transfer money between currencies you can save a lot by using your bank if you have a good deal or if you have a multi currency bank account.
Or you can go and try http://transferwise.com/u/2dc0 that is the new way of sending money with different currencies saving a lot 😉