Getting Started
The Mastercard Gateway integration guidelines provide you with all the payment management information that you need to quickly add to your e-commerce website or similar setup where you want to accept online payments.
Prerequisites
To manage payments and integrate with the gateway, you must understand the basic concepts. These include the following details:
- The payment flow and the related actors, orders, and transactions.
- What are cardholder-and merchant-initiated payments and how they are used in order lifecycles?
Unless you are familiar with these concepts, you must learn the basics before moving forward with your integration steps. For more information, see concepts.
Set up your integration
Follow these steps to successfully integrate with the gateway to manage your payments:
- Select your payment methods.
Determine the payment methods that you want to offer to your payer. Credit cards are the most common payment method, but there are several other payment methods that are popular in your region or within your specific customer base. You must support at least one payment method, but there is no upper limit to the number of methods that you can include in your setup. For a list of payment methods that you can select from, see the following sections:
- Card Payments, such as credit, debit, and gift cards
- Mobile Wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay
- Alternative Payment Methods, such as PayPal and SEPA
- Choose your integration method.
The gateway allows you to select an integration method to implement your connection to the gateway. The methods differ based on the level of control and complexity you want in your setup. They also support different Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance requirements based on whether you want to handle sensitive payment data yourself.
For more information about the integration methods that you want to select, see Choosing an Integration Method.
- Define your order lifecycles.
Consider all the possible order lifecycles that you want to implement. For example:
- Do you have a business where you charge the payer while they are on the website, and services or digital goods which are fulfilled immediately? You can do that through the PAY transactions.
- Do you want to authorize (reserve funds) upfront and then later capture the payment (transfer the money) when you are able to complete the service? This scenario can be implemented using a combination of AUTHORIZE and CAPTURE transactions.
- Can the payer sign up on your website and provide their payment details without making an immediate purchase? With the VERIFY transaction, you can check the details of a payer without charging them.
- What kind of security do you want to use to ensure that you minimize the chance of fraudulent transactions? You can use 3D Secure (3DS) authentication with card payments to authenticate your payers. Transaction filtering, Address Verification Service (AVS), and integration to risk service providers can help you to mitigate fraud.
- Do you want to support return policies which require you to refund payments? The REFUND transaction makes return policies easy to implement.
- Do you need to reserve funds for an extended period? You can implement recurring payments by defining an agreement with the payer and then using merchant-initiated transactions (MIT) whenever a recurring payment is due.
- Do you ever face challenges with your shipments, resulting in delays between authorization and payment capture? If you have delays in your payment captures, the UPDATE AUTHORIZATION transaction allows you to extend the validity period of an existing authorization.
Determine all the various order lifecycles that you want to support, and consequently all the transaction types that you want to use. For more information, see Transactions and Cardholder-and Merchant-initiated Payments. In addition, decide what kind of security features you need. For more information, see Security and Fraud Prevention.
- Choose your authentication method.
You can authenticate to the Mastercard Gateway using passwords or SSL certificates.
For more information about the integration methods that you want to select, see Secure Your Integration With Passwords Or Certificates.
- Obtain a test merchant account.
To connect to the gateway, you need a merchant account that your payment service provider provides. The merchant account provides you both, the connection to the gateway and access to acquirers who link you to the payment methods you want to use.
Your payment service provider creates a test account for you first, and a separate live account later when your integration is complete, and you are ready to start accepting live payments.
For more information about how to obtain a test merchant account from your payment service provider, see Obtaining a Test Account.
- Configure your test account.
- Implement your integration method
When you have a test account, you can implement your integration method and test if you can create transactions. For more information about the integration methods that you want to use, see:
Whichever integration method you use, ensure to integrate using the latest available API version. - Customize your integration.
After the basic integration that you have created, you can handle payments in general. However, most of the individual payment methods require small customizations in the basic integration. For example, a payment method can require specific fields to be used in the transaction requests.
For all payment methods that you want to offer to your payer, check the instructions for adding that method to your integration. For more information, see Payment Methods.
- Implement additional features.
In addition to the basic task of generating transactions, you can add various optional features to your integration to meet your business needs.
For more information on the available features and how to implement them, see Features and Security and Fraud Prevention.
- Test and go live
After you have implemented all the features that you want in your setup, test your entire gateway integration. Follow all the relevant testing instructions for the integration method, and all the payment methods and features. When everything works as expected, request your payment service provider to activate your live account and give you the credentials for it. You can accept real payments now.
After your payment service provider has created your test account, they provide you with the URL and access credentials to the Merchant Administration.
Merchant Administration is a web application where you can manage both your payments and your merchant account. Depending on your merchant profile, the configuration set for your merchant account, you can manage your payments through API requests to the gateway or by manually creating transactions in the Merchant Administration application.
You must customize your account settings in the Merchant Administration application. You can also create your own operators. Separate operators can be useful if you need people within your own business to have varying levels of access to your merchant account.
For more information, see Obtaining a Test Account.