An online payment gateway (PG) is a bridge between the user’s bank account and the portal where the user wants to transfer his money. It is a software that authorizes the user to do an online transaction through modes of payment like a credit card, debit card, net banking, UPI, or the many online wallets that are available these days.

It is a third party that transfers money securely from the bank account to the merchant’s payment portal. It works behind the scenes to handle online transactions safely and securely.

Different payment gateways available in market

1. PayPal
2. Amazon Pay
3. PayU
4. CCAvenue
5. RazorPay
6. PayTM
7. Citrus

How Payment Gateway works

A payment gateway focuses to secure the sensitive information given by the user throughout the process. It does so by encrypting the credit card or bank details given by the user

Step 1: A customer places the order and then presses the Submit button, or its alternative button, on the website.

Step 2: The website or the booking/e-commerce platform takes the user to a payment gateway where he enters all the relevant information about the bank or the card. The Payment Gateway then takes the user directly to the page of the bank or a 3D secure page, asking for the transaction to be authorized.

Step 3: Once authorized, the bank checks whether the customer has a sufficient amount in the account to complete the transaction.

Step 4: Accordingly, The payment gateway sends a response to the merchant. If the response from the bank is a “No’”, then the merchant sends an error message to the customer, telling them about the relevant issue. If the response  from the bank is a “Yes”, then the merchant seeks the transaction from the bank

Step 5: The bank settles the amount with the payment gateway, which successively settles the amount with the merchant.

Step 6: The customer gets a confirmation message of the order being placed, once the above process is completed.

Note: The transaction of the amount involves sensitive information about a user’s bank and card details. Therefore, it is imperative to make sure that this information stays safe.

PayPal Payment Gateway Integration

PayPal is one of the renowned payment gateways and known for its highly secure network system. PayPal has provided easy to follow guidelines to integrate its product with a variety of mobile and web applications.

The integration guidelines are generally provided by the Payment Gateway itself. For example below are the steps provided by PayPal in its developer’s documentation.

Note: Before integrating the PayPal gateway, developers must set up a development environment to get OAuth 2.0 client ID and secret credentials for its environments. These credentials are used to get access tokens that authorize REST API calls.

1. Installing NuGet Package manager for PayPal

Next step is to install Nuget package manager for paypal

2. Configuration

In order to use this SDK, the application needs to be configured. SDK will attempt to look for settings specific to Pay-pal in the application’s web.config file.

<configuration>
<configSections>
<section name="paypal" type="PayPal.SDKConfigHandler, PayPal" />
</configSections>
<!-- PayPal SDK settings -->
<paypal>
<settings>
<add name="mode" value="sandbox" />
<add name="clientId" value="__CLIENT_ID__" />
<add name="clientSecret" value="__CLIENT_SECRET__" />
</settings>
</paypal>
</configuration>

3. Authentication with PayPal

Before making calls to the Rest API, developers have to generate an OAuth access token to be used with API calls.

using PayPal.Api;

// Get a reference to the config

var config = ConfigManager.Instance.GetProperties();

// Use OAuthTokenCredential to request an access token from PayPal

var accessToken = new OAuthTokenCredential(config).GetAccessToken();

4. Configuring APIContext Object

This object helps developers to customize the calls made to PayPal

var apiContext = new APIContext(accessToken);

This object can be further setup to add specific http headers and custom configuration settings.

// Initialize the apiContext's configuration with the default configuration for this application.

apiContext.Config = ConfigManager.Instance.GetProperties();

// Define any custom configuration settings for calls that will use this object.

apiContext.Config["connectionTimeout"] = "1000"; 

// Define any HTTP headers to be used in HTTP requests made with this APIContext object

if(apiContext.HTTPHeaders == null)

{

  apiContext.HTTPHeaders = new Dictionary<string, string>();

}

apiContext.HTTPHeaders["some-header-name"] = "some-value";

5. SDK Call

Once the APIContext object is ready, developers can make a call to the API. Below is an example of how to get the details of a specific PayPal payment.

var payment = Payment.Get(apiContext, "PAY-0XL713371A312273YKE2GCNI");

Advantage of Payment Gateway

1.Security: Payment gateways use industry-standard encryption and protect sensitive data thus protecting both merchants and consumers from fraud.

2.Faster transaction processing: A payment gateway is much faster than manual processing, and customers can make the payment without the inconvenience of long waits or lines.

3.Large customer base: Payment gateways enable customers from around the world to have access to your portal and can expand your customer base exponentially.

Conclusion:

This article explains one of the most important components i.e. Payment Gateway for online businesses, How it works, Integration with benefits of using a Payment gateway for business.

At Neova we have the technical expertise to integrate Payment gateways into any online business web applications.

Location service is used to search and retrieve any address related to Airport or landmark information with multiple components like Countrycode, State, City, Postal Code, AddressLine, etc .

This service is created using the WCF framework and can be consumed by a variety of clients.

Location service architecture:

Location service features are exposed to the clients by means of Location interface. Within the service, this interface is implemented for business rules and parsing/validation in the business layer, which makes a call to database service for handling databases. Database service has been implemented using ADO.Net to communicate with the database and on receiving the data from the database, it will send this data as a response back to the business layer.

If the data is not there in response(as received from database), a request is sent to Google API and the response received by Google API is saved to the database and after parsing and validation, response is sent to the clients, else Google API call is skipped and the response from the database is sent to the clients.

Defining Location service Interface:

public interface ILocationService

   {

        [WsdlDocumentation("Get geocoding information based on the address search text.")]

  [return: WsdlParamOrReturnDocumentation("Returns DataTable containing specified address information.")]

       [OperationContract]

       DataTable GetAddressBySearchText

           (

           [WsdlParamOrReturnDocumentation("Expects search string to find the street address.")]

           string SearchText

           );

   }

Calling database layer methods from business logic:

//Invoking the Data layer service method to get the street address details

DatabaseClient dbClient= new DatabaseClient();
dtSearchBasedAddresses = dbClient.GetAddressBySearchText(SearchText);

//returning the data table containing address details
return dtSearchBasedAddresses;

Example of database layer method

public DataTable GetAddressBySearchText(string SearchText)
{

try
{
//Create Db Connection
Database DBConnection = DBConnectionCertificate.GetDatabase();
using(DbCommand dbCommand= DBConnection.GetStoredProcCommand(Location_Addresses_SP, SearchText))
{
//Execute query.
DataSet dsAddresses = DBConnection.ExecuteDataSet(dbCommand);
return dsAddresses.Tables[0];
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{

Faults.DataLayerExceptionFault objFault=new Faults.DataLayerExceptionFault(ex.Message.ToString());
throw new FaultException<Faults.DataLayerExceptionFault>(objFault,new FaultReason(ex.Message.ToString()));
}

}

Calling Google API:

1. For calling Google API, developers have to instantiate the URL by providing the expected inputs(like latitude, longitude etc) and Google API key.

var url = String.Format("{0}geocode/xml?latlng={1},{2}&sensor=false&client={3}",
ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["GoogleAPIUrl"], Latitude, Longitude, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["GoogleClientID"]);

2.Next step is to convert the default base64 encoding in order to implement a URL safe version

url=GGA.Common.Security.GoogleSignedUrl.Sign(url,ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["GoogleSignatureKey"]);

3.Read the response

var geoCodeResponseXml = System.Xml.Linq.XElement.Load(url);
var status = geoCodeResponseXml.Element("status").Value;

Features of Location Service

Addresses

• Get geocoding information based on the address search text.
• Get place id for the specified state and/or province for a given code.
• Get addresses based on search text.
• Get cities based on state,country or search text.
• Get latitude and longitude for geocoded addresses.
• Get addresses based on latitude and longitude.
• Get a country name based on country code.
• Get states and provinces based on country code and culture code
• Address validation
• Save/Get addresses to/from cache.
• Get cached addresses based on street,city,state,country and/or postal code.
• Get Train station addresses based on station code or search text.

Airport/Airline information

• Get airport addresses information based on airport code or search text.
• Get airline details based on search text, culture code or airline code.
• Get recent airports for the specified user.
• Validation of flight based on airline code and flight number.

Routes

Get travel distance and time for a matrix of origins and destinations.The information returned is based on the recommended route between the start and endpoints, as calculated by the Google Maps API.

Timezone and Phone formats

• Conversion of the local date/time to universal date/time based on the latitude and longitude.
• Get phone formats for countries based on culture code.

Advantage of using Location service:

1. Cost-saving:Location service has been implemented in such a way that for any request, data is first checked in cache or database and sent back as response to the client.Only in cases where data is not available in memory or database, Google API is called.
2. Performance: As Location service is created using WCF, it is very fast as compared to other ASMX web services.
3. Location service: It is interoperable and supports a variety of protocols like TCP,https,msmq, etc.

Conclusion

This article explains the architecture of Location service with few examples and provides the details of its features and advantages. This service provides a lot of location-related features and thus is very useful in applications related to the travel domain.