Audience

Internal and External - Operators, Support Team, Account Managers, Engineers, & Product Teams

Description

This article explains what a payment gateway is and how it works when integrated with Lunchbox

A payment gateway securely passes sensitive cardholder information between the payment processor and Lunchbox. Customers’ private data (i.e., credit or debit cards) can travel through accepted payments via a safely established channel. The goal is to ensure maximum convenience and 100% safe transactions for Lunchbox's customers.

The payment gateway is a key component of the electronic payment processing system, as it is the front-end technology responsible for sending customer information to the merchant-acquiring bank, where the transaction is processed.

In the past, terminals would accept credit cards using magnetic strips and required paper signatures from the customer.

With the development of chip technologies, the signature phase could be removed in favor of a personal identification number (PIN) entered directly into the payment gateway hardware. The accuracy of the entered identification number is handled using the Luhn algorithm. Today, contactless purchases are also available, with many customers now using their phones as payment devices instead of plastic credit cards.

Payment gateway technologies are always evolving to reflect new consumer tastes and technical capacities.