How do I receive payment online?
What does it take to accept credit card or MobilePay payments online? Read about acquiring agreements, payment gateways and alternative payment methods.
There are several ways to accept payment online. The vast majority of online stores accept credit cards, and to do so you need two things:
- An acquiring agreement
- A payment gateway
In this article, we'll go through both - and also look at a few alternatives like MobilePay and PayPal.
What is an acquiring agreement?
In order to accept credit cards online, you need an acquirer agreement.
An acquirer agreement is a contract between your business and a payment provider. It entitles your business to accept payments via credit and debit cards and regulates the terms of how transactions are handled - including fees, security requirements and payout times.
For you as a merchant, the most interesting part of such an agreement is the fees and payout times. If you need quick liquidity, it's important that you get paid quickly. If it's less important, you can keep it with the card issuer for, say, 30 days.
Fees are obviously important. There's a big difference between paying 1.4% or 1.95% of turnover, so it's worth checking regularly to see if you can negotiate better fees.
To accept Dankort, you need an acquiring agreement with Nets. For international cards such as Mastercard and Visa, you can get acquiring agreements with Clearhaus or Nets.
What is a payment gateway?
A payment gateway acts as an intermediary between your webshop and the financial institution that processes the payment. It ensures that payment information (the customer's card number, etc.) is sent securely from the customer to the payment processor and returns a payment confirmation to both the seller and the buyer.
In practice, it works like this: Your webshop is hosted by Shoporama, for example. When a customer needs to pay 350 kr, we forward the message to your payment gateway. The customer gets a window where they can enter their credit card number, expiration date, etc.
The payment gateway then 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 card. If everything checks out, the amount is reserved on the customer's credit card 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 can't withdraw more than the amount authorized by the customer.
Shoporama supports the following payment gateways: Stripe, QuickPay, OnPay, Bambora (formerly ePay) and Mollie. Contact us at support@shoporama.dk if you need help getting started.
How to receive MobilePay online
MobilePay payment online often cheats people because even if you have a business agreement in your physical 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 when your customers pay with MobilePay, they are actually paying with their credit card.
Alternative payment methods
There are also alternatives to credit cards and MobilePay. The two most common are PayPal and EAN payment.
EAN payment is not really online payment in the traditional sense - it's more like invoice payment. In Denmark, the public sector requires that they can pay with EAN, which is why it has become a common payment method in online shops. Note, however, that unlike credit card payments, you have no real guarantee that the money is secured.