Payment Gateway Overview

AmeriCommerce is integrated with a multiude of excellent gateways to help you transact the orders you get in. We strongly suggest checking out AmeriCommerce Payments powered by Chase for your payment gateway needs, it’s a very powerful, safe and intuitive gateway.

Within this article you will find valuable information on how to select a gateway, understanding how gateways work, troubleshooting a gateway and setting up a gateway.

How to Select a Gateway

Gateways are selected by our clients based on a few factors.

• What am I selling?

Some gateways will not allow you to sell certain things such as cannabis, pharmaceuticals/vitamin supplements, hair extensions, gambling products, in-person services and things like that. You will need to review the terms of service for the gateway to discover if they will allow what you sell.

• What kind of rates/plans are available for the gateway?

You will want to review the plan types for the gateway. This will be how you are paying for their services. This can include a flat monthly fee, transaction percentage, flat fee per transaction and can impact your business differently depending on your type of business if its wholesale, retail, high volume or low volume. You will want to research the best gateway for your needs.

• How easily can I get support for this gateway?

You will want to understand the gateways support hours of operation and how to contact them if needed. It will be important to understand they have different branches that have different functions that may work on different days/times. This includes Operations and Risk teams, Technical Support, Payment Batch Team, etc.

• Is it integrated with AmeriCommerce?

Lastly you will want to make sure they’re on this list of integrated payment gateways. That way you will know if they are compatible with our software or not. Want to use a gateway that isn’t on this list? No problem, we can help with that. We offer paid custom development where you can hire out one of our developers to build the integration or you can put it as a feature request on vote.americommerce.com to be voted on and maybe implemented in the future.

*Some gateways will allow you to transact right away after signing up. That’s fine but he wary of the terms of service and how their security works as you may be declined a week later for being able to transact with them.

*Additionally, each gateway supports thousands of merchant banks; please do not confuse the two.  Thousands of merchant banks' programs are supported by the gateways below.

*Each store is allowed 1 active Payment Gateway; that does not include Paypal Express Checkout and alternative methods such as PO and custom methods.

How Gateways Work

Gateways are how you actually perform the fund capture. Think of it like you're at the market to get your groceries. It's important to understand AmeriCommerce role in the transaction process and the different variables that could be influencing your transaction process.

AmeriCommerce is the store, you walk into the store browse and add items to your cart. Then you make your way to the checkout lane. You put the items onto the checkout belt and they're rung up and you get a total to pay.

The gateway is the cashier, you give the cashier your payment and they make sure its the correct amount, make sure the funds are real and there and take the payment.

The shipping provider is the baggage person and they package your items into a container and deliver them to your car.

That's a simplified way to think about it, but it's a fairly accurate comparison.

A more technical explanation is that the customer adds the items to their shopping cart and they proceed to checkout. The total is calculated after the API call to the shipping services and the customer enters in their specific payment information. Once the information is entered AmeriCommerce adds it to an API call and sends it to the gateway services and does not retain payment information in its database as a security precaution. The gateway then reviews the transaction with the bank connected to the card to ensure it's ready to transact and then it responds to the AmeriCommerce software with the approval or denial information. That information is located on your Dashboard -> Orders -> Edit the order -> Payments and if there was an issue the gateways error returned to AmeriCommerce via the API call will be displayed there, otherwise it will say Approved and the time of approval from the gateway.

Troubleshooting a Gateway

Test if gateway is active

If you've just set up a gateway or you want to make sure it's getting a response what you can do is navigate to your Dashboard -> Settings -> Payments and Taxes -> Payment Gateways -> Edit the gateway you want to test -> More Actions (Top Right) -> Test. This will give you a test API call to the gateway service with a fake credit card, it will be an instant decline. The test is really to make sure the API call is happening that you're getting a response, once you run the test you will want to scroll to the bottom to review the API call and make sure you received a response from the gateway. 

Checking an error from an order

When an order comes through and it says "Declined" you can check the reason the gateway gave by editing the order and scrolling down to the payments section. A lot of times it is going to have a number and a small message. For example, this is one from a live order from one of our clients using PayPal PayFlow Pro gateway.

AVS error (general). Declined: Declined: 15005-This transaction cannot be processed. 

As you can see this order was declined. It says "This transaction cannot be processed." and that really doesn't give us much information in regards to why the transaction was declined. So, the next step is to go to Google or Paypal and search for the error number before the reason which is 15005 and the gateway name. Specifically I went to google and typed in "Error 15005 Paypal".

That will lead me to a paypal support article: Why did I get API error codes 15005, 15006 and 15007?

Now I have the article I can research it further to figure out why that order was declined.

"15005 errors result from an AVS decline, usually caused by the billing address not matching the card issuer's information on file. The card-issuing bank may also have declined the transaction due to lack of funds." 

Well, that looks like the bank that issued the credit card to the customer is saying that the billing address might not match or that they don't have the appropriate funds in place to pay for the transaction. If you wanted more information on the error in this case you would contact Gateway's support team, as it is their software that returned the error.

Automatic declines (Fraud Protection)

AmeriCommerce software is designed with customer interactions in mind. This means that ideally most, if not all, orders should come naturally through the front end of the store by customers entering in their orders. However, some of our clients do like to utilize the Order Entry on the dashboard to enter in orders for customers that may call in their orders or need a large order via email. Normally this is fine if its just an order here and there being entered for the customer but problems can arise from a client that uses the Order Entry feature on the dashboard to enter many orders in for customers utilizing CSR employees.

The problem here is that AmeriCommerce has a fraud protection system that monitors IP addresses and order status returns from the gateway. That means if the same IP address gets 5+ declined orders in a 24 hour period, the system will automatically disallow that IP address from making an orders by stopping the ability for that IP to trigger an API call to the gateway. 

Making sure your gateways are assigned to the correct store

If you are utilizing AmeriCommerce great feature known as Multi-Store setup it is important to make sure you have a gateway set up to the correct store. Each store is allowed one gateway per store and on a multi-store setup you need to ensure that you have the correct Store selected for each gateway otherwise it can cause one or more stores to no longer be able to accept payments.

Test Credit Cards

Here are a list of test credit cards you can use to place a test order and get a declined response from the gateway when placing an order on the dashboard or the front end.

Visa: 4111111111111111 | CSV-123 | Expire-10/2030
MasterCard: 5111111111111191| CSV-543 | Expire-10/2030
Discover: 6011111111111141 | CSV-543 | Expire-10/2030
American Express: 371110201010004 | CSV-123 | Expire-10/2030

Integrated Gateways and their Setup

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