Potential Micro-Services in a Payment Gateway

This post is particularly important for you if you want to:

• Do technology transformation to break a monolith payment solution to micoservices
• Want to cloud optimize your payment solution
• Want to develop payment solutions from scratch in a cloud native way
• Want to know potential microservices in a payment gateway
  

A payment gateway is a sophisticated system with many components and these components need to work in proper cohesion in order to deliver fast transactions with greatest possible transaction success rate. Following are potential micro-services to serve this purpose.

1. CRM Service: A service to facilitate dashboards, backend-operations to merchants, resellers & administrators. It is also used to enable, disable, configure pricing and other features of a merchant by admin.
   
   
2. Fraud prevention service: It can be a pre-auth or post-auth service running it’s business logic in parallel to other services.
   
   
3. Core Transaction Service: It can be a service to facilitate all transactions like authorization, sale, settle, refund etc. You can also do a logical separation of such micro-services instances on bases of transaction type or category of transaction like card-present and card-not-present.
   
   
4. SMS Service: It can be a service working in completely asynchronous ways to send SMS to customers
   
   
5. Email Service: It can be a service working in asynchronous ways to send Emails to customers
   
   
6. Transaction Batch Processing Service: It can be a service to process batches of transactions packed in files at scheduled times or on immediate bases. They can be required for processing refunds, settlements etc
   
   
7. Reporting Service: Merchants, resellers and acquirers need reports on daily bases and this micro-service can automate all such daily, weekly or monthly reports

 This list can grow as per the need and some other potential micro-services can also be like 3DS service, tokenization service, dynamic currency conversion service etc

Thanks for reading

You are welcome to comment and share your understanding

How smart payment page can improve transaction success rate of a payment gateway

Payment page is the page of a payment gateway which collects card details from a buyer. It is a critical component in determining transaction success rate of the whole system. In this blog I am trying to capture all the work which we can do to make it smart.

Audiences: All payments enthusiasts, architects, developers, CIO/CTOs of payment firms are welcome.
Scope: How payment page can be made smarter to increase transaction success rate.

Here is a list of workable action items, follow this and increase transaction success rate of your payment platform.

1. Page size: This aspect can be very important mainly in India and other developing countries where internet infrastructure is not very strong. If payment page is not light, it will take time to load, and here comes chances of transaction failure. Please consider following for size of a payment page:
1. Remove unwanted/less desired images/logos
2. Change/remove images with improper size/format
3. Remove unwanted java script/CSS files
4. Remove commented/hidden code
   
   
2. Responsiveness: By responsiveness I mean following:
1. The page should be adaptive to changes in web-browser window. It should change placement and alignment of constructs on the page. This becomes very important when your page is supposed to be opened from mobile phones, tablets, desktops and machines with different size of screen
2. All the validations for card details should be done using Java script or AJAX calls to server. There should not be any validation performed at server side only, because if such a validation fails it will take time for the user to see the updated page after a round trip to the payment server
   
   
3. Dynamic methods of payment and payment types: A method of payment can be card association, or a particular net-banking bank. For example Visa and MasterCard are two methods of payment. Payment type can be Credit/Debit card or net-banking. When the buyer is redirected from merchant system to the payment page, there are various possible options:
1. Displaying only the MOP/Payment type selected by buyer at the merchant web site and hiding all other payment types/MOPs
2. Displaying all the supported payment types/MOPs for the merchant, but by default selecting/highlighting only the method of payment selected by buyer at the merchant web site
3. At transaction level merchants should be given option to choose method of payment based on transaction level flags, such as currency, transaction amount, product type, domestic or international card, etc
   
   
4. Handling a page refresh: You know that when you make online payments you read one thing for sure.... "Do not press stop/refresh/close button". True, in some cases payment gateways cannot help to handle this scenario and if the user presses the killer button, the transaction will fail. But a payment gateway should give due diligence to this case, because its a direct killer. The payment page should be tested properly for the following things:
1. There should be be any issue if a user presses refresh at the payment page
2. If the user is redirected from payment page to some other payment platform and user does not return after an interval, try to perform a status inquiry with the outside payment platform to resolve the status. Do not just say a session timeout or web-browser closed
   
   
5. Look and feel: Look and feel of the page needs to be nearly same to merchant e-commerce platform, because this will keep the buyer at home with merchant. The buyer should not be surprised by the new payment platform page which is totally different from merchant's web-site theme. You can do the following basic things:
1. Keep logo of merchant at payment page
2. Color schemes of payment page should be similar to merchant's
3. Business name of merchant should be clearly written on the page
   
   
6. Number of clicks: More time user takes to complete a transaction, less are the chances of transaction being successful. More number of clicks also introduces more number of errors. Do not have many boxes for prompting the user to enter information. You can detect payment type and method of payment from entered card number automatically. Try to fill some boxes from the information supplied by merchant in the payment request. Do not take many confirmations from user
   
   
7. One-click checkout: One click checkout or quick checkout is the ability of buyer to choose a card from a list of cards (previously saved cards by the same buyer) and proceed for the transaction. The user is not supposed to enter all card details again. This enhances user experience, reduces the overall transaction time and hence more success rate
   
   
8. Cancel button/link: You should not prompt the buyer for cancelling a transaction by displaying upfront a big clearly visible cancel button, instead a link to merchant website can be given with text something like ...."Click here to go to www.merchant.com"
   
   
9. Multiple support payment pages: By support pages, I mean any other pages of a payment gateway which support the main page in completing the transaction. You can try to avoid these pages, if these are mandatory for some reason, then try to have all that content in the main payment page only. Following are some examples of support pages:
1. Page for shipping/billing information
2. Page for order detail
3. Page for Surcharge information display
4. Page for EMI scheme display
5. Other confirmation pages
   
   
10. Supported web clients: Today we have different types of clients, like different web-browsers, different mobiles and tablets. A payment gateway needs to be tested for all the possible clients. The payment page can look defaced and distorted with some clients. Some times validations do not work the same way with all the clients. Some times SSL certificate of payment page does not work well on all the clients.

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Note: I have tried to be comprehensive, and I agree that I may have missed something very important also. I request you to put in comments if I have missed something. I want this page to capture all the possible things we can do to make the payment page smarter.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment

How to improve payment gateway transaction success rate

Transaction success rate for a payment gateway is critically important, and there are various ways to improve. The best option is to analyze your payment gateway and identify where the transaction is dropping.

In this blog I am trying to present some techniques to improve success rate, and all of these techniques are applicable to almost all payment gateways. Here is the list:

1. Payment gateway integration: All merchants do not have skilled technical team to integrate with payment gateways. Payment gateways can do the following things to smooth the integration process.
   
   a) Simplify integration: This can be done by providing proper documentation, simple use cases, examples, sample codes in different technologies, avoid any complex integration steps be completed by merchant.
   b) Integration API's: A payment gateway can provide integration API's for different technologies/programming languages and common eCommerce platforms. Merchant should be able to paste the API's and get started.
   c) Integration testing: If something is not tested, it will fail. Each merchant should perform testing of integration by going through a UAT, which payment gateway should provide. The UAT should be comprehensive by having all the different possible cases of handling approval and failure.
   d) Integration support team: A payment gateway should have a team of skilled professionals to support merchants integrate.
   
   Here is another post of mine about how to do better integrations for best success rate.
   
   
2. Improper validations: For security reasons there are validations at various steps. If validations are not proper then at any step a valid transaction can be flagged as invalid, and hence will be dropped. Here are some important points in this regard.
   a) Merchants should test all validations when they get postback from payment gateway after a transaction is completed.
   b) If a merchant posts an invalid but optional field to payment gateway. Payment gateway should not reject the transaction. Since the field is optional a payment gateway can try to normalize the value.
   c) Send email to merchant for each invalid transaction, send proper logs in the log system to later see and improve.
   d) Less is the number of mandatory fields, the better it is.
   
   
3. Smart Payment Page: Payment page is the page which collects card details from buyer. There are various features of a smart payment page. Lighter is the page, fast it will load, more mobile friendly it will be. It will reduce refresh of payment page by user. Internet infrastructure in India is not very sound, and a lighter page in this case will win. Here is more about a smart payment page - Smart Payment Page
   
   
4. One click checkout: Different payment gateways call this feature differently. It allows the buyer to save card details on payment gateway and all subsequent transactions only require the buyer to enter CVV. It will speed up the checkout process and will result in better success rate and user experience
   
   
5. Intelligent routing: Payment gateways usually integrate with many payment acquirers/processors. Each acquirer serves some services better than others. Here are some examples:
   a) It can improve success rate by providing more number of methods of payments (card types, etc).
   b) A transaction failed on one acquirer may pass on another.
   c) If one acquire is down for some reasons, other acquirer will still be able to process transaction.
   d) International transactions, dynamic currency conversion, tokenization, 3DS authentication and other such services are not supported by all acquirers
   
   
6. Segregation of 3DS process (MPI) from authorization: MPI is responsible for cardholder authentication using 3DS. It is technically possible to segregate this service from authorization service. It will allow flexibility and control in intelligent routing of transaction. All acquirers in India may not support this feature
   
   
7. Handling a failed transaction: If a transaction failed with one card (method of payment) the payment gateway should prompt the user to use some other card (or a different method of payment) and complete the transaction. If the transaction failed for some internal technical reason with one acquirer, payment gateway may try to complete the transaction with some other acquirer
   
   
8. Number of methods of payments: More is the number of methods of payment, more are the options available for the buyer to use, more are the chances of transaction to success. It will also give more flexibility and control to intelligent routing
   
   
9. Reduce transaction time: Scalability of payment gateway is very important, it should be an enterprise solution with minimum latency, even under load. The time window after starting a transaction and its completion should be minimum
   
   
10. False positive: Some times the fraud and risk prevention system can flag a valid and authentic transaction. It is known as a false positive. You need to do proper analytics and checks that it should not happen
    
    
11. Status inquiry: Some times it happens that the transaction is successful, amount is deducted from buyers account but merchant does not get confirmation about it. A status inquiry web service from payment gateway can allow the merchants to detect such cases. Notifications can also be provided by payment gateway to handle this case. In order to complete the process the right way, the payment gateway should also be consuming such status inquiry service from acquirers, mainly for net-banking transactions
    
    
12. Redirects and forwards: Avoid internal (and sometimes external) forwards and redirects. Try to achieve the same via a server to server call or with some other alternates. Less is the number of clicks/steps/legs/time/forwards/redirects/internal errors, more will be the success rate.

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You are welcome to comment and inquire more. Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment

Payment Gateway Development Guidelines

This is to brief you about best practices in developing payment gateway, here I am not providing low level details. In one way this list can be long, but at a high level I want to list 10 best practices or rule of thumb.

My objective here is to make the payment gateway deliver better success rate, be secure, fail safe, maintainable and scalable. This way you should be able to create a payment gateway which will cater requirement of future.

Here you go...

• Modular and plug-gable: A payment gateway has to integrate with different payment processors or acquirers (modules), a transaction has to be routed to other core modules also, for example – dynamic currency convertor, fraud and risk preventer, sending emails/SMS, tokeniser, sending online real time notifications etc. All of these features when added as a modules make the payment gateway simple, scalable, secure and maintainable. Having different modules for different features also allows parallel processing and best utilization of available resources, and in all this helps in giving better transaction success ratio
  
  
• Defensive programming: By this I mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_programming and other techniques to eliminate any possible bugs, modular interdependencies, security issues and unforeseen scenarios
  
  
• Secure application development processes: Application development process needs to include automated and manual security testing, code review etc
  
  
• Poor database can kill your payment system – consider going through https://www.onlinepaymentsindia.com/2013/12/databasekills.html
  
  
• Single entry/exit points – Each module should have one and only one entry/exit point. This way you can apply proper access controls at function/module level. This would also allow you to handle errors/exceptions at one central place, via a single route
  
  
• Request/Response contract with client: For different services that your payment gateway is giving to merchants, try to have a limited set of urls that merchants/users can use. Do not have a long and confusing set of URLs or parameters. Request and response contact with merchants should also be clear and concise. Type, minimum length, maximum length, allowed characters, possible values should clearly be defined. This will ease payment gateway integration, your merchants may not be having a big technical team to handle technicalities of you system. This simple is payment gateway integration, more is transaction success rate
  
  
• Batch modules: End of day processing, reconciliation, reporting, settlement and some analytics are usually done in batch mode. You need to decide on your batch modules and processes in initial phase of development, if not then in the end this will turn out to be a big hurdle. If you are using java, then spring batch can be good for batch processing. Before finalizing the data model, consider batch modules also. Click to see batch modules details
  
  
• Crypto: This is sometimes a challenge, because it involves key management, secure storage of keys and card holder’s data. This is usually target of attackers also. There are many different security strategies possible. At a high level following considerations can be good:
• Divide keys in parts and keep at different physical/logical locations
• Encrypt keys
• Using unique key per transaction can help
• Keep tight access controls on keys and key encryption keys
• Keep rotating the keys
  
  
• SOA: Since it is a modular software by nature, service oriented architecture can lend reusability and performance. We have front-end, back-end services, batch modules etc. SOA glues modules loosely, with high coherence and low coupling/inter-dependencies
  
  
• Consider different industries: A payment gateway is not only about e-commerce card not present transactions, it is also about mobile payments, retail – card present transactions, EMV transactions, traditional POS transactions etc. Your data model, access control, and application design needs to consider this.

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You are welcome to reach me for any suggestions and queries. Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment

Scalability by Parallelizability in Online payment gateway

Scalability and responsiveness in online payment gateway is not an option, it is a requirement. Some optional steps/process in a payment gateway performed in a parallel/asynchronous way can help in maintaining scalability of the system.  This parallelism will enable the system for betterment in latency and throughput. While some processes can only be performed in a sequential fashion, but the system designer should always check for processes which can be performed in an asynchronous way.

Following are some optional processes in an online payment gateway, which I think can be performed in parallel:

1. Fraud and Risk Prevention check: A check made for detection of a possible fraud in the transaction under process
   
   
2. Sending Email: Sending emails to buyers, merchants, self and any other third parties.
   
   
3. Sending SMS: SMS to the buyer
   
   
4. Dynamic currency conversion related processing: Dynamic currency conversion can sometime be performed in parallel
   
   
5. Sending online notifications to merchants: Some payment systems send HTTPS notifications to merchants
   
   
6. Account updater: When card details of the buyer has changed, and an update is required
7. Tokenization/One-Click-Checkout process: Tokenization or one-click-checkout or easy checkout is sometime used to speed up the checkout process, and this is mainly achieved by storing the card details for future use

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Batch modules in Payment gateway and technology

The major part of a payment gateway is the back-end and batch modules. In this blog I will mainly focus on batch modules in payment gateways, functions and one example of batch processing technology. Front end of payment gateway accepts online real time authorization requests, and after this the back-end finishes/completes the request. Batch modules in payment gateway mainly serve back office operations, analytics, reports, settlement/clearing and End of day processing. Let us we have a look at each of the functionality mentioned above.

• Clearing & Settlement: This mainly involves transfer of funds from different entities like issuer to acquirer, payment gateway to merchant. It is mainly achieved by iterating over each of the online real time requests accepted from merchants and then creating a batch file, sending to acquirer/payment processor, receiving response file, parsing the response file and updating the database
  
  
• Reconciliation & Reports: Merchants and other financial entities require different kind of reports in different kind of formats. For example daily/weekly/monthly transactional reports, totals of different kind of transactions and summary
  
  
• Analytics: This mainly involves identifying different kind of parameters. For example, identification of potential business areas, who is doing what, what kind of transactions, is more from which merchant etc. Depending upon the flexibility and adaptability of analytics module, it can be much importance as an added service to merchants.

Technology selection for your payment gateway is of critical importance. The batch modules will be creating, parsing, sending/receiving and updating different file formats. Batch modules also perform database intensive operations, and would mainly run as scheduled tasks configured at particular time or internal of time.

Let us see why spring batch can be a module of choice. Spring Batch is a lightweight, comprehensive batch framework designed to enable the development of robust batch applications vital for the daily operations of enterprise systems. Spring Batch builds upon the productivity, POJO-based development approach, and general ease of use capabilities people have come to know from the Spring Framework, while making it easy for developers to access and leverage more advance enterprise services when necessary. It is intended to work in conjunction with a scheduler, not replace a scheduler.

Spring Batch provides reusable functions that are essential in processing large volumes of records, including logging/tracing, transaction management, job processing statistics, job restart, skip, and resource management. It also provides more advance technical services and features that will enable extremely high-volume and high performance batch jobs though optimization and partitioning techniques. Simple as well as complex, high-volume batch jobs can leverage the framework in a highly scalable manner to process significant volumes of information.

Spring batch can serve the following technical objectives:

1. Batch developers use the Spring programming model: concentrate on business logic; let the framework take care of infrastructure.
2. Clear separation of concerns between the infrastructure, the batch execution environment, and the batch application.
3. Provide common, core execution services as interfaces that all projects can implement.
4. Provide simple and default implementations of the core execution interfaces that can be used ‘out of the box’.
5. Easy to configure, customize, and extend services, by leveraging the spring framework in all layers.

All existing core services should be easy to replace or extend, without any impact to the infrastructure layer.  Provide a simple deployment model, with the architecture JARs completely separate from the application.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment

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Tokenization – A solution for Security, Convenience and compliance

You have heard about tokenization or tokenization in payments, let me explain what tokenization in payments is “Merchants who accept card details on their payment page, can send the card number and expiration date to some third party (token provider) via a web service (or any other API) and in response merchant will get a token number against the card details, this token number can be used in future to get the actual card number and expiration date from the same token provider” The token number is generated by such algorithms that card details cannot be derived from token number.

At an abstract level tokenization can provide a merchant with

1    1) Increased online sales: Express checkout or one click checkout can be achieved using tokenization. This improves the checkout process dramatically by reducing the checkout time and added security; this also decreases the chances of transaction failure due to invalid card details. These kinds of services also promote the customer to return to merchant page for future requirements.

2    2) More security and reduced PCI DSS scope, as merchant is not storing card details on its system, so will be the reduced PCI DSS scope, and no fear of losing card details in a security breach.

3    3) Use of card details: Many online merchants usually have integration with more than one payment gateway, if tokenization system is independent of these payment gateways then the same card details can be used in any number of payment gateway. This provides the merchant with better flexibility and control.

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Any questions and comments are appreciated. Thanks for reading

EMV Compliant mobile payments in India and global trends

EMV compliant (Chip and PIN) based mobile solutions are going to dominate card present transaction space worldwide, and there are some global as well as domestic forces pushing things in this direction. Let us we put together some technologies and trends in card present transactions ecosystem. There are two parallel momentum talking place. 

Once is technological momentum

1. Mobile technologies offering convenience with usability and widespread use by new generation

2. Chip and PIN card (EMV), Chip based debit card from Rupay

3. Fraudsters developing advanced technical patters for breaking secure systems.

The other is

1. Global Migration to EMV, specially increase in adoption of EMV in US

2. Drives by RBI and NPCI. RBI has mandated issuance of Chip and PIN based card to card issuers.

3. Big eCommerce merchants allowing COD (cash on delivery) are migrating to mobile based card payment on delivery.

4. Drives by VISA, MasterCard and other payment schemes to mandate Chip and PIN based transactions in future

So let us welcome the change with new mobile based EMV compliant (Version 4.0, level 2) secure solutions, offering more transaction success rate, less number of chargeback’s, increased sales, conveyance & reliability, and finally new challengers and game changing innovators.

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Choose the payment gateway which increases your sales

So you are running an online business and you accept online payments from your customers, and you will have to integrate with some payment gateway. This blog is about which payment gateway will better suite you, the conclusion upfront is "Choose the payment gateway which increases your sales/revenue". In other terms your payment gateway should be having

• Highest transaction success rate
  
  
• Advanced sales enhancement features like:
• Facebook payments  
• Payment retry option using click to pay button via email
• Mobile payments
• Payment through QR code
• Support for merchant promotional program
  
  
• CRM with sales analytic – find and target potential customers
  
  
• Express checkout
  
  
• PCI DSS compliant
  
  
• Easy integration API’s with proper documentation and integration kit as per merchant's technological needs
  
  
• Payment gateway payment page having look and feel similar to merchant page, so that customer feels at home and safe
  
  
• Fraud and Risk management system – this feature of payment gateway can help merchants be protected from sophisticated frauds and chargeback

Using the right set of tools and technologies’ supporting your online business is need of the hour. If such a payment gateway increases your sales by 5% then this could be a jackpot.

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Online Payment Gateway in India – Convenience Blended with Reliability

The online payment gateway in India has made payment against products and services purchased very easy and a process of least time-consuming experience. This in resultant consequence of making payment an easy experience for customers has invariably affected the business patterns of merchants nationally and internationally. The term “internationally” is stated because customers from other part of the world also become one of the fortunate beneficiaries to experience ease and convenience of online payment gateway in India against certain merchandising.

What involves with online payment gateway in India?
To say in the least narrative version, this names as a process of facilitating online payment safely and in a matter of great confidentiality whereby customer’s personal information about debit cards, credit cards and other payment means is maintained under absolute secrecy. Followed by a merchant’s willing acceptance of bank accounts, debit card or credit cards through the system of online payment gateway has logically augmented the growth of business as well as resultant upturn in the reliability and trust of the system.

What exactly involves with the online payment gateway in India is a very simple yet very reliable way of accepting payment from customers and delivering the received payment to the concerned merchant. Meanwhile, acceptance or decline of the payment is entirely subject to the nature of information supplied by the customers. The situation of payment decline is also experienced owing to browser related issue from the customer’s side or some technical issues at the end of recipient. However, the long and short of the payment gateway system is offering an ease of facility with regards to making payment regardless of location that a customer may hail from.

Is online payment gateway in India reliable?
The experience of reliability comes through a person’s satisfactory outcome from the whole business of virtual payment entryway structure. In the resultant consequence of the structure being dis-satisfactory, the person doubts making further payment using the particular source. However, the long-term existence of companies acting as a third party payment entryway promising fealty and confidentiality to both the customers and the merchants clearly indicates that the system of virtual payment doorway is reliable and very authenticated provided that you have chosen a reputed gateway payment source.

How to choose reliable payment gateway source?
When it comes to using online payment doorway in India, do not forget to ensure about the reputation of the website prompting you make an attempt of your payment. Always consider this from the point of your own safety about your personal information about your credit card or debit card because at the time of making payment you are almost confiding your “must be secret” information about your payment means to a third party.

Piece of advice
Do not be fooled by the third party gateway system until you are convinced after studying all the reliable sources supporting its relevance and trustworthiness. This is to your own safety and benefit to avoid any unsavory consequence later. You are also advised to run few searches in Google or in your favorite search engine and read the available information to help yourself reach at a conclusive decision in this regard.

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How to keep up a payment gateway database performance high for fast user experience and fast transactions

If database of a payment gateway is slow then user experience will also be slow and would lead to low transaction success rate, it will have cascading effect for example when a page is taking time in loading then user will press back/refresh button and then it would lead to a failed transaction. A loss to the payment gateway and merchant both.

As a developer you know that computing powers/processors have got very powerful but input/output has not got such powers and speed, and slow input output becomes reason of poor performance many a times.

Your database system can kill you when, may not deliver the performance you want, it can be a database for which hackers will thank you, or its stored procedures logic can break when you make certain mistakes.  There can be many mistakes, but common of them are:

1. Coupled database schema: When database schema is too coupled, there will be many foreign keys and other constraints, leading to complexity and hence to poor performance. An open advice in this matter can be KISS” -  Keep it simple stupid
   
   
2. Many transactions table: If you have many tables storing transactions, like for one application service request if your database is storing information in many tables, two or three tables should be enough
   
   
3. Loose security: When you do not have different users for different roles and privileges, and you are using one or two admin account for all database operations, you have kept welcome door open for hackers to exploit you. If your database has critically important information, then it is better to keep it under a firewall as an offline machine. One should also take care of SQL injection at application layer
   
   
4. Multiple read/write operations in a service call: If while serving one online request you are hitting your database multiple times, for example you are performing multiple read/writes to display a page or providing response to a service request. Try to keep minimum back and forth between database and application
   
   
5. No caching: if you are not using any caching mechanism to access (static) information from database, you can be overheating your database system
   
   
6. Low network bandwidth or low speed or low IOPS between application server and database server could be another reason to watch for. Check your limits and see how much bandwidth you are consuming, check what are the peaks.
   

Concluding piece of advice can be, “Your database is not yours, its database of your clients, do allow them to use it, and do not allow hackers to enjoy it”

Thanks for reading

Online payment transaction failure is a business loss. See how you can eliminate the loss by doing a robust payment gateway integration

Failure of eCommerce transaction is a direct sales loss to online merchants. An eCommerce transaction can fail for many reasons, but I want to talk about the reasons which can technically be controlled by merchant and payment gateway both. Let us try to brief the reasons

1. Poor integration of merchant eCommerce platform with payment gateway: A merchant eCommerce platform integration with payment gateway may have following kind of issues
• Integration not tested for different use cases before going in production
• Merchant eCommerce application sending invalid data to payment gateway in a transaction, for example a negative amount in an sale transaction
• Unable to handle a timeout in response from payment gateway. If payment gateway allows merchant should try a status inquiry request with payment gateway
  
  
2. When merchant web application is on HTTP. In this case when payment gateway will be redirecting customer web browser to merchant website, then there may be a warning from secure to non-secure zone and all customers may not be able to handle it properly.
   
   
3. A payment gateway should also be flexible in providing more space to merchant. Like maximum length and allowed characters in customer address field should be sufficient to handle rare cases, payment gateway should be able to handle UTF-8 strings in such cases.
   
   
4. Poor network bandwidth of merchant web application server
   
   
5. Merchant/payment gateway processing many information fields as mandatory, when that part of information can be processed as optional. More are the information fields in process, more is the complexity and chances of bugs.

Click to See Right Payment Gateway Messaging Format for a Payment Gateway Integration for details on messaging format. Thanks for reading