How to integrate payments system into an app

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These days, people are turning more towards smart devices and prefer buying everything from their devices without leaving the comfort of their home or office. The amount of e-commerce business is growing significantly, as a result of which companies are adopting new mobile trends. There is a great need to integrate payment system into existing app. It is a known fact that mobile payments encompass different technologies, and you may need to use your phone to carry out various transactions on different devices. This would be a difficult task for developers, as the process of integrating payment systems into the apps different from one platform to the other.

A payment gateway allows your online store or mobile app to accept credit/debit card payments from customers. There are lot of things to choose from, as they cost money and charge per transactions. Picking the right payment gateway and integrating it into existing app will keep your business run smoothly. Payments can be one of the key ingredients of mobile strategy. If you already have an app, it sounds like a tempting or obvious choice to integrate payment system into existing mobile app.

 

Before that let’s see what is payment gateway?

Payment gateway is a point-of-sale (POS) machine that could be found at any retail store. The POS machine sends the credit card information to the issuer to confirm if the owner has enough money to make the purchase. In short, it acts as an intermediate between the client and the enterprise. If the consumer wants his/her payment to reach its destination (seller), then it is must to choose a reliable payment gateway.

 

payment-gateway

 

The same logic seems to follow for mobile apps, with a bit of twist. As the owner of the store, you need to have a payment gateway and merchant account. The case remains same in either of the cases where the mobile app is under development or already developed. It is very important to have a merchant account, as the amount is stored here before it is moved to the actual bank account.

When the user buys a product from your mobile app, they are moved to cart that hooks up with the payment gateway. The payment gateway performs the same function as POS in the retail store, where the request is sent to the card processor. Once the payment is approved, the payment information goes from the gateway to merchant account. It is stored there for a few days until it is sent to the merchant’s bank account.

 

What are the types of merchant accounts?

There are two types of merchant accounts – dedicated merchant account and aggregated merchant account. The first type of account is set up for individuals, and is made for additional money. If you want more control over the money, it is better to choose dedicated merchant account. The acquisition process may take some time and you will be asked to submit exhausting information about your company. PayLeap and Authorize.net are the best companies that provide dedicated accounts with additional services.

With dedicated account, the money is sent to your bank in 2-3 days. However, it may take more time with aggregate account; it may take a bit longer. Payment gateway services such as – PayPal, Braintree, Stripe etc allow users to get aggregate account, where one can either decide to spend the money or make a request to transfer to their bank account. If you choose to get the amount to your bank account, you will have to wait around 5-6 days for them to arrive to your actual bank account.

You need to give additional details about your company, products and services to get aggregate merchant account. The acquisition process is not much complex and you can get the account with ease. Whatever is the type of merchant account you choose, you need to give some information about your products and services.
Now, you might be thinking why you should give information about the type of products you are selling.

There are different scenarios for physical items and digital content. You need to deal with different types of app store policies based on the type of product you are going to sell. Google Play Store and Apple Play Store are the two popular app stores, and they don’t allow third-party payment processors to involve when it comes to sell digital products within your application. All the transactions are performed by Apple and Google Play, if you want to sell digital content. On the contrary, the app stores recommend using mobile payment gateway providers, when it comes to selling physical goods.

Therefore, it is very important to define the type of product you want to sell to get merchant account.

 

Different Payment gateway providers

Now, you have got an idea of payment gateway and merchant account. The next thing to know before you integrate payment system into existing is – the payment gateway providers. There are a number of payment gateway providers, some of which are very popular. Here is the list of top payment gateway providers.

 

Popular Payment Gateways

 

PayPal

PayPal has been providing payment gateway services for years and is the best choice if you are new to e-commerce. It is a free payment gateway and you will get aggregate merchant account. You will be able to sell your products and services by paying as less as 2.9% fee per transaction. The main advantage of PayPal is that it is evolving all the time and is embedded with plethora of features.

 

BrainTree

This is another important and popular payment gateway service provider. It is in fact, a subsidiary of PayPal. This payment gateway provider has many features such as – fraud protection, live customer support, payout within 1-2 days and many more. The best thing about this payment gateway provider is that its software development kit, featuring Android and iOS support. It has no fee on transaction for the first $50k. They charge you 2.9% per transaction, once the income rises beyond this.

 

Dwolla

This is another well-known mobile payment service provider that provides online payment services at a rate of %0.25 per transaction for goods which are of $10. There is no fee for products under this price. It even offers full package of payment options such as –ability to pay to thousands of people at once, invoice generation up to more than 2,000 people and so on. The best part is that it works on all the popular operating systems such as – iOS, Android, Windows etc.

 

Stripe

This is a noteworthy and trusted payment gateway provider that scales with Braintree. It is featured with mobile checkout; authorization of data and many more options that every small and large company needs. The best thing about Stripe is its secure transmission standard. When it comes to refunds, the charges may vary from country to country.

 

Authorize.net

This is a reliable payment gateway existing in the US and Canada that gives a dedicated merchant account. The company provides payment gateway software for mobile operating systems and websites as well. It also offers fraud detection, recurring billing, information management, PCI DSS and other features.
When it comes to security of these payment gateway providers, they are certified as PCI Level 1 service providers. They are compliant with PCI-DSS rules and are more secured because of their top quality servers. The API of these payment gateways is designed for developers and need extensive documentation. You can compare the above payments and choose the best bid.

 

How to integrate SDK with an existing app

Once you are ready with the merchant account and selected a suitable payment gateway provider, you have to integrate the SDK. Every payment gateway provider offers SDKs that include strong mobile libraries that facilitate the job. You can make less effort to implement and at the same time you are not exposed to PCI compliance. You can find these kits on official sites payment gateways, using which you can create payment forms for data collection.

You can even build your own from the scratch or use their pre-build component. You will have good control over the UX and will have an opportunity to use predefined widgets. Whether it comes to payment gateway for iOS or Android, users can pay seamlessly using credit card data stored in their accounts. Mobile payment systems can even offer tokenization using mobile libraries. The sensitive data is tokenized by the provider and redirected to the server, known as authenticated environment. The transfer of tokenized data from the payment gateway to servers is carried out by the means of API keys.

Development of e-commerce mobile apps is not a difficult task, especially if you are familiar with the step by step procedure. It needs in-depth planning and research, before you start.

We hope this article will serve as a good guide and help you to integrate payment system into an app in an effective way. Looking forward to know your comments on the above!

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Rahul Singh

Sr. App Developer

Rahul has been associated with the apps industry for more than 9 years now. He has seen the apps economy grow from its nascent days to a full fledged industry with its complete ecosystem as of today. His interest lies in pursuing and getting to know the best app development technologies, processes and platforms. He is truly an app enthusiast. In his free time he loves playing console games and reading history.

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