How do I receive payment online?

There are several ways to accept payments online. The vast majority of online stores accept credit cards, and to do so, you’ll need two things:

1. A merchant agreement
2. A payment gateway

In this article, we’ll go over both of these—and also take a look at a couple of alternatives, such as MobilePay and PayPal.

What is a merchant agreement?

To accept credit cards online, you need a merchant agreement.

A merchant agreement is a contract between your business and a payment provider. The agreement grants your business the right to accept payments via credit and debit cards and sets out the terms for how transactions are handled—including fees, security requirements, and payout schedules.

For you as an online store owner, the most important aspects of such an agreement are the fees and payout schedules. If you need quick access to cash, it’s important that you receive the funds promptly. If that’s less of a priority, you can leave the funds with the card issuer for, say, 30 days.

The fees are, of course, important. There’s a big difference between paying 1.4% or 1.95% of your revenue, so it’s worth checking periodically to see if you can negotiate better rates.

If you need to accept Dankort, you must have an acquiring agreement with Nets. For international cards such as Mastercard and Visa, you can obtain acquiring agreements from providers like Clearhaus or Nets.

What is a payment gateway?

A payment gateway acts as an intermediary between your online store 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 online store is hosted, for example, by Shoporama. When a customer needs to pay 350 kr., we forward the request to your payment gateway. The customer sees a pop-up window where they can enter their credit card number, expiration date, etc.

The payment gateway then verifies that your online store has an acquiring agreement that accepts the specific credit card and that there are sufficient funds on the card. If everything checks out, the amount is reserved on the customer’s credit card, and Shoporama records that the order has been paid.

You then have a certain number of days to withdraw all or part of the amount. You cannot withdraw more than the amount the customer has authorized.

Shoporama supports the following payment gateways: Stripe, QuickPay, OnPay, PensoPay, Flatpay, ePay, Nets Easy, and Mollie. Contact us at support@shoporama.dk if you need help getting started.

How to Accept MobilePay Online

Online MobilePay payments often confuse people, because even if you have a merchant agreement for your physical store, you can’t use it online.

Fortunately, you can use your payment gateway and your merchant agreement. That’s because a credit card is always linked to a MobilePay user, so when your customers pay with MobilePay, they’re 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 isn’t really an online payment in the traditional sense—it’s more comparable to paying by invoice. In Denmark, the government requires that payments be made via EAN, which is why it has become a common payment method in online stores. Note, however, that—unlike with credit card payments—you have no real guarantee that the funds are secured for you.