How do I receive payment online?

There are several ways to accept payment online. In this article we will look at:

How to accept payment online

What is an acquiring agreement?

What is a payment gateway?

How to accept MobilePay payments on a website?

Alternatives to accepting credit cards

The vast majority of online shops accept credit cards. To accept credit cards, you need two things:

1. An acquiring agreement
2. A payment gateway

In this article, we'll cover both. But we'll also look at a few alternatives.

What is an acquiring agreement?

In order to accept credit cards online, you need an acquiring agreement.

An acquiring agreement is a contract between your business and a payment provider. Here, the payment provider grants your business the right to accept payments via credit and debit cards. The agreement regulates the terms of how transactions are handled, including fees, security requirements and payment times.

For you as a webshop owner, the most interesting part of such an agreement is the fees and payment terms.

If you need quick liquidity, it's important to you that you get paid quickly. If it's less important, you can keep it with the card issuer for, say, 30 days.

Fees are of course extremely important. There's a big difference between paying 1.4% of turnover or 1.95%. So it's worth checking periodically to see if you can negotiate better fees on your acquiring agreement.

To accept Dankort, you need an acquiring agreement with NETS. International cards such as Mastercard, VISA etc. can be obtained in several places such as Clearhaus, NETS etc.

What is a payment gateway?

A payment gateway is a solution that acts as an intermediary between a webshop and the financial institution processing the payment. It ensures that payment information (i.e. the customer's card number etc.) is sent securely from the customer to the payment processor and returns a payment confirmation to both seller and buyer.

This means that your webshop is hosted by Shoporama, for example. When a customer pays e.g. 350,-, we send the message to your payment gateway. In other words, we say "customer X wants to pay 350,- to webshop Z". And then the customer gets a window where they can enter credit card, expiration date, etc.

Once this information is entered, the payment gateway makes sure that your webshop has an acquiring agreement that can accept the credit card in question and that there is enough money on the credit card. If everything checks out, they reserve 350,- on the customer's credit card and notify Shoporama that the payment has gone through. The customer is notified that the transaction has gone through and Shoporama registers that the order has been paid.

You then have a number of days to withdraw all or part of the amount. You cannot withdraw more than the 350,- that the customer has authorized you to withdraw.

If you contact us at vadskaer@shoporama.dk, we can help you set up a payment gateway.

Shoporama supports Quickpay, Epay, Mollie and OnPay.

How to receive MobilePay online

MobilePay payment online often cheats people. Because even if you have a business agreement in your normal store, you can't use it online.

Fortunately, you can use your payment gateway and your acquiring agreement. A credit card is always associated with a MobilePay user. So if your users want to pay with MobilePay, they only pay with their credit card.

In addition to the normal fees, it costs 49,- ex VAT per month to receive MobilePay and 1,- ex VAT per transaction.

Alternative payment methods

There are also alternatives to credit cards and MobilePay. The two most common are PayPal and EAN payment. It is actually misleading to say that EAN payment is online payment because you have not actually received the payment online while the purchase is being made. EAN payment is similar to invoice payment, but in Denmark the public sector requires that they can pay with EAN payment and therefore it has become a commonly known payment method online. However, unlike credit card payments, you have no real guarantee that your money is safe.