Introduction

India is the number 1 country for digital payments, surpassing countries such as China and Brazil. According to the data circulated by NPCI, approximately 20,466.98 million payments were processed in November 2025, underscoring the strong foundation and success of financial freedom available online to all. This economic freedom comes only by choosing the right payment gateway for a website, one that is approved and adopted by businesses for secure payment.

Before you start with a website, it is essential to know how the integration of a payment gateway is done in a website. Learn how a payment gateway offers security, using its technical implementation. Setting up APIs, implementing SDKs, and establishing payment processes, including checkout, success, and failure pages, are all common steps in the integration process. 

In simple terms, a payment gateway acts as the backbone of your business. When it comes to a reliable payment gateway, it is of absolute importance to choose a gateway integration that handles advanced encryption, helps in preventing fraud, and assists in strong regulatory compliance, thereby safeguarding sensitive customer data. With a strong payment gateway, the payment is securely sent from the customer’s bank account to the merchant’s bank account within a few seconds. 

What is a payment gateway?

In simple terms, a payment gateway acts as the backbone of your business. Because when it comes to a reliable payment gateway, it is of absolute importance to choose a gateway integration that handles advanced encryption, helps in preventing fraud, and assists in strong regulatory compliance, thereby safeguarding sensitive customer data. With a strong payment gateway, the payment is securely sent from the customer’s bank account to the merchant’s bank account within a few seconds. 

Selecting the Ideal Payment Gateway in a Website

When choosing a payment gateway, there are multiple factors to consider. Start by choosing a payment gateway that you can trust in terms of security, integration and smooth processing of payments without any glitches. Consider the pointers below when planning payment integration on the website, as per your business needs

1.  E-commerce Businesses

Every e-commerce business is known for its reputation for security, fast checkouts, and swift payments. There are multiple payment processors like fast checkout, UPI payments, net banking, e-wallets, and EMI that are integrated on e-commerce websites. Online businesses need a payment gateway that delivers a high successful transaction rate, smooth checkouts, and quick and safe refunds. This builds trust between the customer and its merchants. Ensure your payment gateway partner has strong encryption, fraud detection, and PCI-DSS compliance when integrating a payment gateway into your website.

2. Offline Marketplaces & Distributors

Offline marketers are hesitant about adopting new technology unless clear benefits are demonstrated to them. They simply want their money to be safe when online payments are made. So, convincing them can only happen if your payment integration on their website is strong, and every amount is successfully transferred without any hindrance. Their payment gateway should be able to support split payments, vendor payouts, and compliance with regulatory norms. 

3. Startups & Small Enterprises

Security, cost, and convenience of setup are top priorities for small enterprises. They ought to select a gateway with little technical complexity, low onboarding expenses, and straightforward but secure integration. 

4. High-Volume Businesses

Big businesses require a website with scalable payment integration that can handle several payment processes, large transaction volumes, and peak traffic. Features like enterprise-level security, customised checkout, intelligent routing, sophisticated analytics, devoted account management, and simple dashboard comprehension are crucial. 

Note: At Cashfree Payments, we offer developer-friendly integrations that offer an exceptional customer experience to every business owner and their customers. Payment integration in your website and app with Cashfree payments is effortless and easy with a wide range of SDKs. RESTful APIs, plug-ins, and support for all major platform languages.

Types of Payment Gateway for your Business

Before choosing the right payment gateway for your business, think about your business needs and infrastructure. There are 4 types of payment gateway available, but not all gateways suit your business, so choose wisely. 

1- Hosted Payment Gateway

It is a third-party payment provider offering a secure portal for businesses to accept digital payments to their bank account. A hosted payment gateway, in simple terms, means that when a payment is initiated by a customer, he is directed to another (third-party) website for a secure payment to be successful. Once the transaction is completed, the customer is automatically redirected to the merchant’s website.

2. Self-Hosted Payment Gateway

If you are confident in providing your customers with a secure user experience, then you might be more interested in this type of payment gateway, like Stripe and Shopify. When a customer is not directed to another website but rather gets a provision for making the payment on the host’s (merchant’s) website, it means it is a self-hosted payment gateway. Though this does seem like a seamless and effortless option but, the merchant will not be able to have any technical support that they would get in a hosted payment gateway. 

3. API-Hosted Payment Gateway

An API payment gateway is a single point of entry for the customers of the application. It sits between the client and the backend services for the application. The API-hosted payment gateway comes with some important features like authentication and security policy enforcement, load balancing and circuit breaking, protocol translation and service discovery, monitoring, logging, analytics, and billing. An API-hosted payment gateway offers the merchant a full range of personalised checkout options, and all of this can be integrated into your website and your mobile. The merchant must ensure its website has Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification and possibly PCI DSS compliance, depending on the data flow.

4. Direct Post Payment Gateway

This allows you to gather your clients’ bank information on your website and deliver it via an HTTP POST, providing you with complete control over the checkout process while adhering to PCI regulations. It ensures that your financial and personal information is kept off the servers to prevent fraud and other wrongdoing.

By serving as a middleman, it encrypts data and shares it with the payment processor for authorization, guaranteeing a seamless client experience. 

Why do I need to integrate a payment gateway?

For a payment aggregator to operate as intended, it needs to do the following – 

1. Collect the amount payable from the business.
2. Offer a wide range of payment options to the end customer and collect their payment information securely;
3. Based on the information entered, send the payment to the correct processor; for Example, Route a Visa card payment to Visa, and then to the bank that issued the card.
4. Connect the end-customer with the issuing bank for the collection of the OTP or PIN (depending upon the payment method);
5. Send back the payment status to the end-customer and the business.
6. Convey to the business when the amount has been settled successfully to their bank account.

Payment aggregators expend considerable effort in integrating and connecting with important stakeholders in the payment ecosystem – card networks, banks, digital wallet providers, BNPL operators, and government infrastructure entities such as NPCI. However, to complete the loop and have a secure transaction, the business must connect securely to the payment aggregation platform. Setting up this “connection” is what integrating a payment gateway means, and why it is necessary.

How to integrate a payment gateway in India?

Most payment aggregators will offer you different integration options based on your use case. Do you want to collect digital payments via your website? Or via an Android / iOS application? Is your website operating on an e-commerce platform, such as Shopify or WooCommerce? In each case, there will be some effort involved in either adding some code to your website, adding an SDK to your application, or installing a plugin on your Shopify or WooCommerce dashboard.

In many cases, the job of integrating a payment gateway falls upon a team of developers, either in-house employees or a contracted third-party team. In either case, this team will then scope out the kind of integration you need, review the required time to integrate, set aside some time for testing and quality control, and give a timeline to you. For different use cases, the time taken to complete the integration process is given below – 

1. Web Redirection to PA-hosted checkout: 2-3 working days
2. App-based redirection to PA-hosted checkout: 2 days
3. Platform-based integration (Shopify, etc.): 1 day
4. API-based “seamless” integration: 4-6 weeks (this is when you’ve built your own checkout)

For a web-redirection checkout (>80% of all businesses using a payment aggregator use this option), there are 4 steps you need to follow.

Getting your API keys

Each payment aggregator will provide you with “API Keys”, which are similar to a username and password in that they validate your business’ identity for the payment aggregator. This ensures that all payments accepted under these API Keys will be credited to your business account, and ensures that unscrupulous actors cannot manage digital payments via payment aggregators.

You can read this page to understand how to fetch your Cashfree Payments API Keys from your Cashfree Payments dashboard. If you don’t have a Cashfree Payments account, click here to sign up.

Initialising SDK

The next step is to initialise the SDK. This effectively opens up your website’s access to the code that runs a PG/PA’s’ hosted checkout. Doing this will allow your website to seamlessly open this checkout for a website user looking to make a payment, and then redirect them back to your website once the payment is completed.

In terms of coding, this will require your developers to use a short code snippet to fetch information from a web URL and “load” the checkout code for execution.

Creating Order

To process any payment on a payment aggregator, you have to create an order. Each order will have its own unique identifier (Order ID, Order No., etc.) and this identifier will be used by both the payment aggregator and your business to track the payment, its status, and its settlement. 

This will require your developer team to write code which passes the necessary following information to the payment aggregator – 

1. The amount of the order;
2. The currency of the order; and
3. Some customer details (phone number, customer ID)
4. URL for customer to return to post transaction

Loading Checkout

Based on the information passed to the payment aggregator in the order creation flow, the payment aggregator will load the checkout and collect the payment details of the customer. After the information is collected, it will validate that information and then pass the transaction request onto the relevant stakeholder (bank, card network, digital wallet provider, BNPL partner, etc.) for processing.

For your developer(s), they will need to review that the checkout is behaving as expected, is capturing the relevant order amount, and is presenting the full set of available payment methods to the end-customer.

Concluding the payment

Once the customer has added their payment details and given the required validation to process the payment (Card OTP, UPI PIN, etc.), the payment is passed onto the relevant bank to record the payment and then the status of the payment (successful, pending, failed) has to be communicated to the merchant and to the end customer.

Based on the output received from the payment aggregator, your developer(s) will have to route the user to the right page (order confirmed, payment not successful -> nudge to retry) and to capture that status next to the order ID in their own systems.

Why is integrating a payment gateway difficult?

Since payment integrations involve taking funds from end customers, it is very important for the flow to be thoroughly tested and various different edge cases to be considered and experimented with. Most payment aggregators will offer a “sandbox” environment for developers to build and test an integration without involving money movement, so that they can thoroughly test the integration before taking it to “production”, i.e. make it live and ready for customer use. 

However, there is still a lot of developer effort and bandwidth that will get consumed in setting up the integration, testing multiple flows, debugging it, and then re-testing it after the bug has been resolved. Most developer teams will spend a majority of their time in building this integration going back-and-forth across multiple stages to identify errors and figure out what’s not working as expected. Even with comprehensive documentation, developers need to set up and do coding to initiate the experience, and then need to keep revisiting the code to solve problems.

As part of our “Developer Experience” (DevX) initiative, the team and I have built a user-friendly developer playground to help developer teams explore, try, test, and use Cashfree Payments’ product integrations. It reduces the time-to-go-live from 2-3 days to a remarkable 15 minutes!

Cashfree Payments’ solution – DevStudio

DevStudio offers developers an interactive guide to try out various integrations with minimal inputs and just a few clicks, enabling them to test and experiment with the integration without needing to code to set up the checkout at their end. Once they are satisfied with the outcome, they can simply copy the code from the DevStudio interface to build the code snippets required to access Cashfree Payments. In its essence, it offers the liberty of experimentation to build familiarity with the expected outcome and what inputs are required, long before you have to write a single line of code!

Cashfree Payments’ DevStudio is live and currently freely accessible to the public. Currently the platform offers easy go-live for Web Integration and Mobile Integrations, as well as detailed information for integration on the following SDKs – Go, PHP, Java, NodeJS, .Net, and Python.

Using DevStudio

You do not need a Cashfree Payments merchant account to try DevStudio. You can access the platform here. The first step would be to identify which integration you need. You can do that by clicking on the “Explore your Integration” button to review the possible integrations that you can use.

After you have identified the right integration for your business and use case, you can click on the relevant option (Web Integration for website; Android / iOS for your Play Store and App Store presence) to initiate DevStudio for that specific integration. 

Each of the integration options will be broken down into easy steps, and will come pre-filled with test credentials for you to use the playground in the “Sandbox” environment. With a few clicks (and less than 2 minutes!) you can easily create a simulated checkout and review the payment process for your customers. You can also experiment with which parameters are being passed, including return URLs and transitioning the user from Cashfree’s checkout back to your website. This will give you an insight into the overall process of integration and give you visibility on what the end outcome should look like.

If you have a Cashfree Payments account, you can get the API Keys from the dashboard and experiment with DevStudio directly to start the integration process. At the end of each step, you can copy the code and paste it in your own environment, completing a 1-2 day integration process in <1 hour.

In addition to the DevStudio playground, the Developer Experience team at Cashfree Payments has also created multiple resources to help you get started with our products. 

• YouTube Channel: Guide videos to help with your integration
• Discord Channel: Connect 1:1 with our developers to get queries answered
• Github: Review our hassle-free integration kits, plugins, icons, and more!
• Documentation: A repository of companion docs to help with your integration

We hope that you find DevStudio useful and it makes the process of integrating with Cashfree Payments easier and more efficient for you. 

Frequently Asked Questions for Payment Gateway Integration

Q.1 Is it possible to integrate multiple payment gateways?

Yes, you can integrate multiple payment methods for your customers. Most e-commerce websites integrate multiple payment gateways to provide a smooth payment experience just in case any one payment method lags.  

Q2. How are refunds and failed payments handled on payment gateways?

Through a centralised merchant dashboard that offers total visibility and control over transactions, payment gateways manage refunds and unsuccessful payments. Automatic identification and reconciliation of failed or reversed transactions guarantees that the money is either not deducted from the client or is refunded within the specified time frame.

Q3. Is it possible to verify whether my payment gateway is operational upon integration?

Indeed, practically all payment gateways include a sandbox, often known as a test environment, so that merchants can examine the dashboard and transactions before anything goes live. Once the business owner approves, only then can the gateway be switched to live mode for real customers to make payments. You can test the gateway by entering the test credentials and dummy payment details.

Q.4 What is the timeline of payment gateway integration in the website?

Depending on the complexity of the website, the demand and the type of business, it can take from a few hours to a few days. This is because a developer team of the payment gateway provider has to make sure every detail is entered and the security promised is to the T. 

Q.5 Can I grow my business with the help of a payment gateway?

Definitely, the majority of contemporary payment gateways are designed to provide a seamless checkout process and dependable performance, which enhances client confidence, conversions, and overall business expansion.