All the payment gateways!

Paypal played an excellent part in allowing us to test and refine how online payments were handled by Timely. Now that we know that this area is rock solid, the techbots have introduced not one … not two … but five new payment gateways!

We are delighted to introduce: DPS Payment Express, Stripe, eWay, Pin Payments and Authorize.net in addition to PayPal. The cool thing is that this selection wasn’t arbitary as they were selected by you and other users at our user forum.

Did I mention there are five new ones?!

What can you do?

The next question is what can you do with all the payment gateways? The first thing to note is that you can still only use one. This means choosing the best gateway to handle your business’ online payments for invoices and appointments.

Here’s what else you can do:

• Connect to one of six different payment gateways
• Choose which credit card icons to show as part of the booking process
• View card payments on invoices
• View a summary of successful and failed transactions for the chosen gateway (click View transactions link from gateway set up page)
• Switch gateways at any time

How to set up a new gateway?

Now we should cover the steps to add (or change) a new payment gateway:

1. Head to Settings > General settings > Payment gateway settings.
2. Click the gateway that you want to use.
3. Enter the required credentials (could be an email address, customer ID, API key, etc.).
4. Click the Activate button.

The following gateway summary will appear at the top of the settings page. In the example below, Authorize.Net was selected.

From here, you can edit your online payment policies and choose which credit card logos display when payments are taken. In fact this is an ideal time to revise your online payments settings!

As mentioned earlier, you can view all credit card transactions by clicking the View transactions button. And, if you’d like to change gateways at a later date, just click the Delete button and choose from the list again.

For more detailed information about activating the individual gateways, check out this help article.

What do your customers see?

Fortunately the customer experience changes very little. Once they’ve made their booking (as normal) they’ll be asked to enter their credit card details then transferred to the chosen gateway to make their payment.

Timely will present a summary of the transaction including which gateway will be used (as below). Note that if PayPal is used, the customer will be taken to the PayPal page as usual to complete the transaction.

Once the credit card details are filled in and the customer clicks Pay now — the transaction will be authorised with your chosen payment gateway. If successful, the payment is sent straight into your merchant account.

In the following example, the customer is being taken to Authorize.net.

That’s the whole Timely payment gateway process in a nutshell! 

While this is exciting, it’s just the start as more gateways will come on stream. To make sure the gateway you want is included, add your vote and suggestion to the gateway feature request on our feedback forum.