RO Payments is the missing link between your site and the payment provider. Acting as a translator, it speaks the language of your extension and the language of the payment provider. As such providing a stable and trusted connection in the processing of payments on your site.
For many people the inner workings of online payments is a black hole, here we explain in a few steps how the process works.
Payment Process Flow
The process of an online payment generally follows the following process:
- Customer selects products and/or services to buy
- Customer goes to to the checkout page
- Customer selects a payment method
- Customer confirms the purchase
- Customer is send to the payment provider
- Customer completes the purchase
- Customers is send back to the website
- Customer is shown the result message
If we break this down into which step is done by who, we can see who is responsible. In this example we take VirtueMart as the shopping system.
- VirtueMart
- VirtueMart
- VirtueMart
- VirtueMart
- RO Payments
- Payment Provider
- RO Payments
- VirtueMart
What happens after step 4 is that VirtueMart has no idea how to talk to your payment provider but RO Payments does. VirtueMart will handover control to RO Payments and tells how much the customer needs to pay. This information is then send to the Payment Provider including the payment method, if available. Customer can then perform the actual payment and when that is completed the Payment Provider will inform RO Payments of the result.
Now that we have the result of the payment RO Payments will inform VirtueMart and hand the customer back to VirtueMart to show the result page.
This works the same way with all other extensions.
What do you need?
To be able to receive online payments you need the following:
- RO Payments
- An active contract with a supported payment provider
- One of the extensions on the supported extensions list
With these 3 items you can setup the process as explained above.