What is Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway is the service that carries a customer’s payment details from a checkout to the institutions that authorise and settle the money — card networks, banks, e-wallets. In the Philippines a gateway’s value is mostly coverage: whether one integration reaches cards, GCash, Maya, online banking and over-the-counter payments.

Category
E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)
Also called
Online payment processor, Payment aggregator
Related
PayMongoXenditChargebackAPI (Application Programming Interface)
In our work
E-commerce developmentPricing

It helps to separate three roles that a single Philippine provider usually performs at once. The gateway transmits and tokenises the payment request. The acquirer or aggregator holds the relationship with the card networks and wallet operators so the merchant does not need one with each. And the provider holds collected funds in a merchant balance before paying out to a nominated bank account, which is why money reaching your checkout and money reaching your bank are two different events on two different days.

The things worth comparing are rarely the headline rate. Fees are charged per transaction and vary by method, so a store selling mostly through wallets and a store selling mostly on cards pay different effective costs on the same price list. Beyond that: how often payouts run, how refunds and disputes are handled, whether webhooks are reliable enough to drive order state, how much of the card data your own servers touch, and what onboarding documents the provider requires before you can go live.

Common questions.

Do I need a gateway if my customers only pay through GCash?

Not strictly, but collecting through a personal wallet number does not scale. A gateway attaches each payment to an order reference, confirms it to your system automatically, and gives you a record you can reconcile and refund against. Manual matching of screenshots to orders breaks down quickly once volume rises.

How much does a payment gateway cost in the Philippines?

Fees are charged per transaction and differ by payment method, so cards, e-wallets and over-the-counter payments each carry their own rate. Providers publish current schedules and revise them, so price the options against your real method mix using the provider’s own figures rather than a third-party summary.

Where it comes up.

Related terms.

  • PayMongo

    PayMongo is a Philippine payment gateway built around a developer API and hosted checkout, aggregating cards, wallets including GCash, Maya and GrabPay, online banking and over-the-counter payments behind one integration.

    E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)

  • Xendit

    Xendit is a Southeast Asian payment infrastructure provider operating in the Philippines and neighbouring markets, offering one API for cards, e-wallets, bank transfers, virtual accounts, over-the-counter payments and outbound disbursements.

    E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)

  • Chargeback

    A chargeback is a card payment reversed by the cardholder’s issuing bank after a dispute, pulling the funds back from the merchant along with a fee.

    E-commerce & Payments (Philippines)

  • API (Application Programming Interface)

    An API is a defined way for one piece of software to request data or actions from another: a checkout asking a payment gateway to take a GCash payment, or a dashboard pulling yesterday’s sales from an accounting system.

    Web & Software Engineering

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