How to integrate a payment gateway into a mobile app?

We are living in a complex world where online shopping and e-commerce business solutions have become the order of the day. Where it has allowed the e-commerce apps to implement and integrate the payment gateway which can complete the online transaction with just clicks. With the help of mobile app development of payment gateway users can make payment easily for availing services such as purchasing an item from an e-commerce site, booking train or flight tickets, hotel reservation, and booking a cab bill for a good meal at a restaurant and so on. As per the report from BI intelligence, the market associated with in-store mobile payments is expected to reach $503 billion by 2020. One should not underestimate the fact of payment gateway has been a great helping hand in flourishing the sales because now making a payment is an easy task.

What is a payment gateway?
Payment gateway is an e-commerce service which provides credit card payments for online and traditional stores. It also facilitates these transactions by transferring essential information between payment portals like web-enabled mobile devices or websites and the front end processor.

How it works in a mobile e-commerce app
The consumer visits the e-commerce app and chooses the product which he or she wants to buy then the product is added to the cart, and then the card gets linked up with the payment gateway. When the user checks out or pays by card, then the payment gateway sends a request to the bank which has issued the user's credit or debit card then the bank sends back an approval code to make your business work.

Different kinds of merchant accounts are shown below:

There are two significant types of merchant accounts which payments processors are offering:
· Dedicated merchant account
· Aggregated merchant account

Dedicated merchant account
It is the best choice if you are a merchant or a business owner. The primary advantage is that it helps to adjust the customer requests also the money process transfer in it is pretty fast. In order to implement, dedicated merchant account you will have to bear some additional expenditure. However, the main disadvantages are that it’s expensive and its price depends upon the gateway service provider which usually quite high.

Aggregated merchant account
The aggregate merchant account is one platform where you can store all your funds together including the other people money. It is more popular than the dedicated account. In fact, the big payment processing player such as PayPal, Braintree, and stripe all are offering the aggregate merchant account where you need to provide some of your personal information. Unlike the dedicated, it has a quicker acquisition, and the process is also easy.

So, the above given is the fundamental mechanism of payments gateways which you should know before you set out on your journey of payment gateway integration in mobile apps. Now below will discuss the use of APIs for payment gateway integration in mobile application development.

Well, there are numerous gateways for providing the users to purchase whether it is a debit card or credit cards or by using the app API for processing transaction. So, while implementing you need to take care of specific challenges. One of the significant challenges is that you need to take care of the entire task of processing a safe or secure purchase with the help of digital transaction of money while integrating the API which means you will solely responsible if in case any misappropriation of online funds. Besides, you may have to face the problem of not being able to pay by certain gateways because it does not accept payments through mobile apps.

Below given is the most popular and spread provider of payment gateways which are used by developers of commercial mobile app development company so, let’s have a look:

Stripe - Stripe has been voted as the number one payment processor among all the competitors it is most popular e-cash services which is simple in design which also offer a lot of scope for developers to provide customization. It is also implemented with some APIs and support a large number of libraries also below given are some advantages of it.

· It supports both iOS and Android platforms.

· Can integrate the social media buttons for a payment process

· Help to know about the monthly financial report.

· It also makes easy payments in more than hundred currencies.

Braintree - Braintree is another payment processor which can process payments from most popular apps like PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and credit cards. Most of the features are similar to the stripe also below given are some advantages of it.

· Help to offer the facility of a recurring bill.

· Payments can be authorized with just one click by using PayPal and Venmo.

· It is majorly used in more than forty countries and supports 130 different currencies.

PayPal - PayPal has achieved prominence ever since it was introduced in the form of the digital wallet. In fact, many people use PayPal for online shopping or booking tickets even the PayPal SDK mobile allows you to accept bitcoin credit card payments, etc. below are the given features include:

· It offers the facility of split payment.

· You can even create a simple invoice.

· Can host your checkout page.

Integrating payment gateways into your mobile platforms can be a difficult task to do as it involves intricate steps, planning, methodical research and hard work to pull off. Keep in mind above given features while implementing the same as it will help you to make the whole process easier with different mechanisms of payments, tips, and tricks. Therefore before initiating and implementing API in your application, compliance with PCI standards and learning from the best mobile app development company in the industry is all you have to do.