Payment Gateway Integration: What to Plan For

Beyond simply processing a charge, a solid payment integration needs to handle failed payments, retries, refunds, and webhook events for asynchronous payment methods.

PCI compliance requirements shape the architecture significantly, which is why we favour hosted payment fields or tokenization over ever touching raw card details on our own servers.

We test the full failure-path scenarios, not just the happy path, since how a checkout handles a declined card often matters more to conversion than how it handles a successful one.