Payment Gateways for Mobile Applications: Everything You Need to Know

Cashless financial operations are sought-after these days like never before: it’s proved by global payment gateway market share estimated at $22.09 billion. This popularity comes from the fact that such technology enables users to pay for products fast. As a result, it’s extensively integrated into smartphone apps and highly promoted.

This post will go through the principles of incorporating a gateway into your software. You may also find out which vendors offer the best mobile payment gateways and how to set one up.

The Payment Gateway: What is It?

What is a payment gateway? This technology connected with electronic commerce solutions (for example, when you create a mobile wallet), enables clients to make payments by passing financial data to the acquirer.

Securing sensitive data, gateways use encryption algorithms. Such technology gives you freedom from the necessity of saving customers’ private information and offers you a protected transaction choice for your clients.

Points to Learn While Integrating a Gateway

If you’ve decided to offer your users a secure option to pay for things through your app, get to know the following things.

Before integration, think about the following points

Security certificates. To manage clients’ confidential data, PCI-DSS certification is required. Even if your gateway for payment is incredibly protected from any cyber threats, you must go through strict authentication.

Merchant (banking) accounts hold onto digital sales money for a brief period of time (usually about a week) before transferring to the company’s main bank cell. Merchant accounts can also be used as security mechanisms to decrease fraud.

Buyer accounts are divided into two categories: aggregate and dedicated. The aggregate account is an excellent method to save funds distributing finances across many companies. The dedicated account is more expensive, but safer and more trustworthy because it is only used by your organization.

Merchant & gateway services: comparison

Sold items. If you offer real items, marketplaces advise using mobile payment gateway providers. If you want to sell digital things, you must stick to the in-app purchase guidelines. All payments would be completed using an Apple ID or Gmail profile, and apps launched through digital stores are not permitted to use third-party systems.

The Common Payment Gateway Vendors

• PayPal is a hosted payment supplier that offers digital payment services to consumers from more than 200 countries and for about 25 currencies. PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal Express Checkout are two supplementary PayPal services useful in implementing payments into e-commerce apps.

• Stripe. The Stripe API is simple to implement into software. A provider may also include a number of useful services and offer SDKs in a variety of programming languages.

• Braintree is a provider that works with 130 currencies in about 40 countries. This mobile app payment gateway is extremely secure, with two-day payments, client support 24/7, and other useful features.

• Authorize.net is a well-known mobile payment gateway provider headquartered in Canadian and American offices. It offers services for websites as well as mobile applications containing such features as built-in fraud prevention, data management, or PCI-DSS compliance.

• Dwolla is a widely known payment supplier with competitive rates. Its system uses an OAuth and RESTful API to interact with all major operating systems. Dwolla also offers a number of payment options.

How Сan You Integrate a Payment Gateway?

We’ll go over the procedures needed for iOS on the Braintree case to resolve the payment gateway integration issue.

Implementing a money transfer gateway into an Android app follows the same steps. The most significant distinction is that software developers must utilize the Braintree library, which was created exclusively for the Android SDK.

Implementation steps

Get to work. First, Carthage or CocoaPods tools must be used to add Braintree to the project.

Show the Drop-in User Interface. You may modify the code, develop a custom user interface, and easily tokenize card data.

Tokenize information. You’ll need to get a client token, which will include all of your server’s setup and authorization information. Then, restart your software and tokenize the necessary data.

Evaluate the integration effectiveness using Braintree test card data and single-use numbers.

Complete the payment process. Get the client’s credit card information, send it to the server, and the server completes the transaction with it.

Credit Card Payments Implementation

Users can enter their payment card information straight into the buyer’s checkout page using API-hosted payment gateways. API or HTTPS calls are required to transfer payments.

Let’s find out benefits and drawbacks of establishing a card payment gateway.

Benefits:

• Comfortable customizing. The UI/UX payment processing is under buyers’ control.
• Implementation. It can be implemented in apps for various portable gadgets, like tablets, smartphones, etc.
• Everything in one place. Customers may pay for items without having to quit your solution.

Drawbacks:

• They must ensure the safety of the API digital transfers.
• Payment processing safety is exclusively the responsibility of businesses (e.g., prevention from penetration into a system).

How to Implement SDKs Into Your Application

Each vendor has its own software development kits (SDKs) with powerful mobile libraries to aid your team in more effective handling card data. They will spend less time integrating as a result of this. SDKs are frequently uploaded on your supplier’s official website.

Gateways for payment can greatly go with such programming languages and tools as Java, .NET, Redux, PHP, and so on.

API implementation is also required for payment processing success. If your app offers digital products, your team will additionally be dealing with platform-specific services.

Wrapping Up

In today’s world, cashless money transfers are a common way to pay for products and services: according to a MasterCard research, 74% of consumers used them before the COVID-19 outbreak. Furthermore, throughout the pandemic, 8 out of 10 people used cashless transactions.

You can apply to a professional software development supplier if you want to learn more than the above-mentioned gateway integration essentials. The experts will help you pass through the process of integrating a secure gateway into your developed application and will answer all of your business inquiries.