Credit Card Gateway Services

A comparison of online payment gateways

A payment gateway is the connection between your Web site and your bank's credit card processor.

The purpose of this page is to discuss and compare a few payment gateway systems with a focus on feature sets associated with ecommerce and database-driven shopping cart systems, as well as the setup and monthly costs involved.

Verisign
Payflow Pro is Verisign's gateway product. Payflow Pro supports all the major payment processors and a variety of payment types. It has been my experience that the support is good and the SDK (Software Development Kit) is fairly straightforward to implement. (Take this with a grain of salt, I am an experienced ecommerce developer.)

Payflow Pro provides immediate connectivity to all major payment processors, supporting a variety of payment types. VeriSign lets you authorize, manage, and support all major credit cards, debit cards, purchase cards, ACH transfers (bank-to-bank), and electronic checks all through the same development kit.

Platform Compatibility
The Payflow Pro SDK is available for the following platforms: Windows¨ 95/NT, Linux, Sun¨ Solaris¨, BSDI, IRIX¨, Java, AIX, HP/UX and others. The SDKs are available from the VeriSign Manager Web site.

Tools
VeriSign provides tools to administer your VeriSign account, to generate manual transactions such as authorizations, captures, credits, or voids, and to track transaction activity through online reports. It's all very full-featured and intuitive.

http://www.verisign.com/products/payment.html

Go2Pay
Go2Pay's credit card processing system provides transaction authorization for all the popular credit card types available today; Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express are all accepted by the secure Go2pay payment system.

Go2Pay has separate FPIs (Form Post Interface) for check and credit card processing. This offers the advantage of having fewer parameters to deal with when implementing check only or credit card only.

Platform Compatibility
Because of the use of form post interfaces, platform is a non-issue. Requests are sent via SSL encrypted html form posts. Results can either be sent as URL-string variables, or easy-to-parse XML.

Tools
The system allows your customers to process and authorize credit card transactions received by Internet, Point of Sale, mail order, telephone order and fax. The reports function facilitates bank statement reconciliation and includes access to the Go2pay Payment Services Center where you can monitor, enter manual transactions (Virtual Terminal) and maintain your account in real-time. Very slick.

http://www.go2pay.com

Cardservice International
Cardservice International offers small and mid-sized businesses credit and ATM/debit card processing, check guarantee services, purchasing card programs and Internet electronic commerce capabilities.

Cardservice's gateway product is called Linkpoint. It comes in a couple of flavors, Linkpoint HTML and Linkpoint API. Linkpoint HTML is cheaper, simpler to implement, and not as good for integration into applications. But it is a good solution for the developer who's more of a designer and needs to get a payment solution up and running on the cheap. The API version is very flexible and requires much more programming savvy to setup. Since we are examining gateways that integrate with database-driven shopping carts, we will be looking at the API version only.

Platform Compatibility
Similar to Verisign, all major platforms and development languages are supported.

Tools
Linkpoint's online tools are similar to Verisign's. A virtual terminal, voids, charge backs, reporting capabilities, etc.

Additional APIs
Two additional APIs come bundled with Linkpoint API, a sales tax API and a shipping API. They can be used to add sophisticated sales tax and shipping calculation (supports all the major shippers) capabilities to an ecommerce system. Each adds tremendous value to Cardservice's offering.

http://www.cardservicelinks.com

By Scott Fultz
President, Mountain Media