An internet payment gateway is, basically, an ecommerce system. With it you may be able to accept payments for the products or services your company offers. Look it as the point of sale (also known as POS) that you find in every store. The only difference is that the costumer doesn’t need to pass his card. He only has to input his data, press continues and that’s it. Nowadays, an ecommerce payment gateway has become the principal solution for much small and medium business, representing a huge percentage of their sells.
How Did It Appear?
Internet payment gateways made their appearance with the Internet. When the first companies started to use the web as selling platforms (and not only as advertisement), a new need appeared in the world. As years went by not only the USA, started to embrace the global net, security improved and the costs of a card payment gateway diminished.
Today, business to business, person to person and retail transactions are a common thing. It’s even considered unwise not to be part of it.
Is It Secure?
Yes, at least as secure as it can be. When you use an e-commerce payment gateway credit transaction, several entities are involved. For a start, you, the customer, who is responsible for assuring that the site from which you are buying has a proven reputation. Then you have the website, whose main interest is to give the customer a quick and effortless operation so he may return. Because of this, the company will maintain its security as tight as it can. The third, and final involved, is the credit card company. They will verify that it is you who is using the credit card and not another person.
Unfortunately, there are still some inexperienced users who input their data in faux sites that only want their credit card information for illegal purposes. There is no countermeasure against this kind of situations.
But for the experienced user, there should be no problem. Merchants use an encryption protocol called Secured Sockets Layer (SSL). It appeared in 1996 and become the standard for many years. Nowadays a new protocol is replacing it, the Transport Layer Security (TSL), which is in its version 1.1.
What Are The Advantages?
The main, and only, advantage for developing an internet payment gateway inside your organization is design. Since you are making it from scratch, you can make the system maintain your corporate aroma and not the identity of the third party that was hired to create the internet payment gateway.