How do payment gateways work?
A payment gateway facilitates the transfer of information between a payment portal (such as a website or IVR service) and the Front End Processor or acquiring bank. When a customer orders a product from a payment gateway enabled merchant, the payment gateway performs a variety of tasks to process the transaction: * A customer places order on website by pressing the ‘Submit Order’ or equivalent button, or perhaps enters their card details using an automatic phone answering service. * If the order is via a website, the customer’s web browser encrypts the information to be sent between the browser and the merchant’s webserver. This is done via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. * The merchant then forwards the transaction details to their payment gateway. This is another SSL encrypted connection to the payment server hosted by the payment gateway. * The payment gateway forwards the transaction information to the processor used by the merchant’s acquiring bank. * The processor forwards
