Payments Gateways Not Supported by BookingCenter - Fake it or Build it?
Posted by Jeff Tweddale on 13 Sep 2012 10:34 AM

Payments Gateways Not Supported by BookingCenter - Fake it or Build it?



We receive requests from LDS partners in various countries around the world to build a payment gateway interface to their national (or regional) payment gateway, so that credit card payments happen for their BookingCenter Sites in real-time. WHile we can do this, and have in some countries, there is usually a significant development cost to do this. The cost to build and support a PCI-compliant payment gateway is usually about US$4,000-10,000 (approaches widely vary). This investment is only relevant if there will be a large number of real-time booking transactions required. If there are not enough transactions to justify this up-front cost, it's better to 'fake' the transaction in the Booking Engine and process the payment 'offline'.

Being able to 'fake' a real-time booking transaction and process the payment 'offline' (ie, manually) requires that you have your own payment gateway technology, which banks in nearly every country are able to provide. It is often easier (and cheaper) to have your local bank give you web access to their payment gateway interface where you can process credit card transactions manually. In this way, BookingCenter simply sets our Booking Engine to capture the credit card details from the Guest for the deposit amount, and then use your local bank's payment gateway to actually process the credit card transaction. Many of our customers do this to avoid having to build a custom payment gateway.

Our advice is to go this 'fake real-time deposit' direction until the cost to build the payment gateway is justified by the amount of business you are generating. If you wish to have BookingCenter quote for the development of a custom payment gateway, please provide us the API (Applications Programmer Interface) specification of your local bank's payment gateway and we can examine it to give an estimate.
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