How To Develop A Payment Gateway in 7 Simple Steps 💳 (2024)

Payment Gateway Development: Summary

Payment gateway development helps companies introduce custom payment functionality in their web and/or mobile applications and provides an opportunity to unlock new revenue streams.

Custom payment gateways support all required payment methods and currencies, offer advanced security of customer’s personal and payment data, seamlessly integrate with customer-facing apps and payment processing systems, and can be easily evolved with new features.

How to builda payment gateway in 7 steps

1. Assess the feasibility of custom payment gateway development.
2. Design payment gateway software and compose the tech stack.
3. Prepare the implementation project plan and estimate resources.
4. Develop the payment processing back end and checkout interfaces.
5. Implement PCI DSS-compliant payment data storage.
6. Run QA procedures in parallel with development.
7. Deploy the payment gateway in prod and integrate it with other systems.

With 750+ talents on board, ScienceSoft provides all the necessary skills to cover the end-to-end development of a custom payment gateway and ensure its compliance with relevant security standards.

A Sample Architecture of a Payment Gateway by ScienceSoft

Below, ScienceSoft shares a sample architecture of payment gateways we create, describes essential solution integrations and payment handling flow.

An online payment gateway serves as a bridge that enables instant and secure transfer of a customer’s personal and payment information between an application that hosts a checkout page (e.g., a merchant’s website, a customer portal) and one or several payment processing systems. The latter can be provided by a financial institution (an acquiring bank), independent payment processing providers (e.g., PayPal, Authorize.Net, Stripe, BitPay), or the company (in case of relying on in-house payment processing). The payment gateway verifies sensitive data provided by a customer (purchasing details, billing address, a credit card number, etc.), encrypts and stores it in a secure and compliant storage. Once a payment transaction is authorized in a payment processing system, approved in a payment processing network (e.g., ACH network, a card network, a crypto coin’s network), and settled between the customer’s bank and a company’s bank, a payment gateway automatically communicates payment success or decline to the customer.

A payment gateway integrates with accounting softwareto instantly transfer data on the successful payments and receive triggers to timely charge due payments (e.g., recurring payments). Additionally, the solution may be connected to a data analytics system to share relevant data required to analyze cash inflow and customer payment behavior.

If you plan to monetize your custom payment gateway by offering it to other companies for a fee, the solution can be equipped with ready-to-use APIs to enable prompt and easy integration with customer-facing apps of the authorized merchants.

When to Opt for a Custom Payment Gateway

From ScienceSoft’s experience, companies looking to implement payment functionality in their web or mobile application often have doubts about whether they should rely on a market-available payment gateway or build a custom solution. So far, integrating a prebuilt payment gateway remains a more popular option, as it offers a fast and easy way to enable digital payments. However, an OOTB gateway is not always the most economically feasible option. Prebuilt gateways can bring high fees for third-party payment gateway providers’ services. They may also require substantial efforts on customization and establishing smooth integration with the required apps.

ScienceSoft suggests opting for a custom payment gateway in the following cases:

How To Develop A Payment Gateway: Key Steps

Below, ScienceSoft’s experts describe the core steps we perform to create a payment gateway from scratch and share best practices to maximize the ROI from the project.

Opt for Professional Payment Gateway Development Services

Having 34years of experience in software development and 18-year expertise in paytech, ScienceSoft can provide:

Costof Payment Gateway Development

Based on ScienceSoft's experience in payment software development projects, we defined the general cost factors that apply to the majority of payment gateway development use cases:

• Requirements forthe functional capabilities, performance, scalability, availability, and security of a payment gateway.
• The number and complexity of integrations with relevant software (customer-facing web and mobile apps, payment processing systems, accounting software, data analytics solutions, etc.).
• The required modifications of the integrated web and mobile apps, both on the technical level and on the app logic level.
• Whether the payment gateway is going to be monetized or not: the former calls for the ready-to-use integration API development.
• Requirements for the appearance, structure, and contents of a checkout page.
• The need to obtain and maintain PCI DSS certification.