Payment Gateway vs. Full Payment Platform: What's the Difference?

Looking to add or update payment operations for your online business?

Great — every well-oiled eCommerce machine needs the right payment provider to keep it running. But the world of online payments can be complicated, and people often ask: What’s the difference between a payment gateway and a full payment platform like BlueSnap?

What Is A Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway acts as the bridge between your website and your banking network, allowing secure payment data to flow back and forth. When a customer comes to your website, enters their credit card information, and clicks “send”, the payment gateway authorizes the credit card and sends it to your bank to be processed.

In other words, it’s like the online version of the terminals you’d see in a brick-and-mortar retailer store. It’s a dumb box until you connect it to a credit card processor.

When you’re using a standalone payment gateway solution, such as Authorize.net, you need to integrate with separate payment processors to support different payment types, currencies, and mobile wallets. Additionally, if you process payments in different regions around the world, you’ll need to integrate multiple payment gateways and processors to support global payments.

If that sounds complicated to you, that’s because it is. As your online business grows, you need a payment gateway solution that gives access to multiple global banks to ensure that every legitimate transaction is processed and approved successfully — otherwise, your revenue growth could suffer.

That’s where a full payment platform comes in.

What Is A Full Payment Platform?

Instead of managing multiple integrations, dealing with multiple vendors, struggling with reconciliation, and paying fees for each separate payment gateway solution and processor you’ve set up for global payments, you can choose a fully integrated, end-to-end payment provider like BlueSnap.

A full payment platform provides everything you need to accept global payments with one integration, one contract, and one account.

This end-to-end payment processing model is the modern approach to payments. It enables businesses to:

• Increase conversions by easily designing and managing localized checkout experiences for customers around the world.
• Support all of the latest payment types like Apple Pay, Alipay, and Google Pay. When a new eWallet or other payment method is released, you don’t have to wait for both your processor and your gateway provider to begin supporting those methods; with a single payment platform, you access modern payment methods more quickly.
• Report and reconcile more easily and efficiently. Rather than needing to fix glitches, identify errors, and determine where reporting discrepancies occur between your gateway and your processor, you can access one consolidated report from your full payment provider.
• Retain complete control over your fraud risk with built-in fraud protection functionality.

If you’re a global business or you’re interested in offering the most modern, flexible payments model available, a full payment platform is the better option for you.

Replace Your Outdated Payment Gateway Solution with BlueSnap’s Global Payment Orchestration Platform

Depending on your business goals, you may be happy with a simple, standalone payment gateway provider like Authorize.net.

However, if you’re a global business or you’re ready to grow, you need to choose a payment provider that’s flexible enough to grow with you. Designed from the ground up to increase your sales and reduce your overall operational costs, BlueSnap’s Global Payment Orchestration Platform provides you with a fully-integrated payment solution.

Plus, our global banking network enables businesses like yours to accept payments from shoppers all around the world — and the platform includes a robust integration with Kount, the leading fraud protection and risk management provider in the eCommerce space, so you can feel confident that your payments will be processed securely.

Now that more efficient, cost-effective payment models have become the norm for eCommerce businesses, older payment gateway providers are falling behind.

For more information about the difference between BlueSnap’s Global Payment Platform and a standalone gateway provider like Authorize.net, click here to read a side-by-side comparison of our features and functionality.

Related Resources: 

• Merchant Account vs. Payment Gateway: What’s the Difference?
• Payment Gateway API’s: What Every Developer & Marketer Should Know
• 6 Reasons Why You Need Your Platform’s Payments Solution To Be Global