3 Thing we want Indian Credit Card Gateways to really improve
11th May 2015

As a web developer in the midst of the e-commerce storm it falls on us to integrate all kinds of payment gateways for our clients. Many of them are Indian. And let me tell you the experience has been terrible.

1. First and foremost please improve the documentation!

I have received documentation from Indian credit card gateways that look like they have been created by slightly retarded chimpanzees. In fact I think actual chimpanzees could do a better job than these guys!

These guys have to understand that we developers are under a lot of time pressure and don't really have all the time in the world to decipher the jumbled garbled information that passes off as instructions.

We want clear step by step guides which cover in clear and concise language what steps need to be done, what variables to pass etc. It would be also immeasurably helpful if you could provide detailed FAQs and code samples.

Documentation should be available online as well as in the downloaded integration documents. A strong message board to post queries might be too much to ask but we ask anyways.

2. Customer Support means that we are the 'customers' and you need to 'support' us!

Calling the credit card gateway's customer support 3 things might happen:

1. We might talk to someone who can and does help (Very rare, almost a miracle)
2. We get passed on like a UPS parcel till inevitably the call drops. And we try again and again.
3. We are transferred to someone who has no idea about our case and to whom we have to repeat our entire narrative who assures us that they will help but does exactly the opposite.

Stop making us chase you! You chase us till the integration gets done to our satisfaction.

3. Build a robust gateway and stop blaming the developer for every shitty problem that is thrown up

It's the easiest goto excuse for the credit card gateway's support staff: the developer has created a problem.

Most of these Indian gateways do not follow any standards of data transmission eg. Some take First Name & Last Name separately, some require Name as a single component. Some require countries to be full names eg. India while others need simply acronyms like IND.

We recently came across a major gateway whose newest version requires everything except alphabets and numbers to be stripped from the information passed to the gateway. Not even a single comma will do. And the best part of it was, no mention anywhere in the documentation.

Add to that cryptic piss poor validation at the gateway end and we have a recipe for unending torture.

As the number of credit card gateways multiply, we need to have standards and protocols common to them all. Who will do that? No idea. Till then us poor developers have to bear the brunt of the gateway incompetency.

No cheers today,

Ron