There are various methods of connecting your website or application to the web payments platform. These may involve using a hosting payments page, an XML gateway or using a pre-existing shopping cart plugin. Each of these integration options are discussed below:

Hosted Payments Page (Secure Payments Page)

This is the simplest integration option. The customer is redirected to a secure site at the point where they must enter their card holder information. Typically you can customise the look of this secure page to match the look and feel of your website although not all providers will offer this. The security risks are lower with this implementation as your website will not handle cardholder information.

XML Gateway

The XML Gateway integration option is more complex than the hosted payments page. Its main advantage over the hosted payments page is that the customer does not need to leave your website to make the payment. The customer will enter their cardholder information on the merchants website. The merchant will accept this information and then send it in an XML message to the Payment Gateway. The security risks associated with this type of implementation are much higher as the merchants website will be processing and transmitting cardholder information.

Shopping Cart Plugin

There are ecommerce shopping cart packages available on the market. Some of these are GPL licensed (No Fees) and are maintained by the community of developers. Others are commerical products which you can purchase. Most of the main players in online payments will have developed plugins for the most popular shopping carts. These plugins would use either the hosted payments page integration or the XML Gateway integration. The benefit of them is that no development work will be required for the integration. You install the plugin and enter your configuration details and then you are integrated.

Virtual Terminal

Most providers offer a Virtual Terminal. This is a secure website or application that allows you to manually process credit card transactions over the Internet. This is useful if you have mail and telephone orders along with your automated website orders. You can log into the Virtual Terminal and enter the cardholder information and authorise the transaction in realtime.

The Integration Options Section of our Payment Service Provider comparison table provides a comparison of the integration options provided by each Payment Service Provider. The E-Commerce Platforms and Shopping Carts Section allows you to see which shopping carts are supported by which provider.

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