M&M MERCHANT CARD SERVICES INC.



PAYMENT GATEWAYS



WHAT IS A PAYMENT GATEWAY?





A payment gateway is the online-equivalent of a credit card terminal. The payment gateways’ job is to encrypt, and then securely authorize a credit card transaction. Payment gateways are fundamentally required when accepting a credit card transaction online, because they’re responsible for storing sensitive credit card data. Sometimes these gateways are referred to as merchant gateways, credit card gateway or payment portal.



WHAT ROLE DOES A GATEWAY PLAY?





Companies like Dharma are also known as payment gateway providers, since we offer payment gateway services. Below is a handy diagram that shows the payment gateway’s role in a credit card sale.



GATEWAY SECURITY





The most important aspect of these gateways is their security. Utilizing a gateway can help your business to be PCI DDS compliant, ensuring that it is not held liable in the event of a breach that leads to credit card fraud. Any business that has access to card information is required to be compliant with the regulations set forth by the PCI. Fraud detection features in the gateway will guard your transactions against criminal activity.

When a customer submits an order, it is completed using HTTPS and TLS protocols, securely transmitting the personal information through all parties involved in the transaction. Some software is even capable of providing real-time payments and translation of currency for foreign customers. Each transaction made through the gateway comes with a small fee to the business owner, which is usually just a few cents.



ADDITIONAL SERVICES





While protection against credit card fraud is essential in today’s world, did you know that a gateway can also help your business run smoothly? Most gateways have a built-in Virtual Terminal, allowing you to quickly and easily process transactions via a browser or mobile device. Gateways also feature recurring billing that makes it easy to setup a subscription or membership, as well as update any customer information needed. And email invoicing makes it a snap to collect payments, and it is incredibly simple to integrate the system into your website with online payment links.



WHO DOES M&M RECOMMEND?





While we can work with virtually any gateway, we’ve found the two that we find most useful for our merchant base, Authorize.net and NMI. Which one we will recommend depends entirely on your particular technical setup, so part of our job is to really understand what you’re building, so we can do our best job supporting you with integrity.


Authorize.net is the largest gateway in the world. And it’s also an industry standard. Virtually every e-commerce platform of any sort supports Authorize.net. In fact, a lot of other gateways also write to the Authorize.net API to ensure they can work with more online platforms. Plus Authorize.net is owned by Visa, so you can be completely assured the gateway will always support the latest security standards and meet PCI Compliance. Remember when they used to say “No one gets fired for choosing IBM“?, well no one gets anything other than accolades for choosing Authorize.net


Our other recommendation is NMI. NMI is not only a great general-purpose gateway, NMI has two unique features that make it a favorite here at Dharma: Dynamic Descriptors, and Multiple Merchant IDs. Very few merchants need these capabilities, but if you do, we can support you.



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