Payment gateways
A payment gateway is the service that actually moves money: it charges cards, collects bank debits, and holds your customers' saved payment details. yRecurring never sees or stores a card number. You connect your own gateway account, and yRecurring tells it what to collect and records the outcome.
This chapter has one page per gateway. Each page covers the same ground: what the gateway collects and in which currencies, how to connect test and live modes, the webhook setup, how cards are saved for renewals, refunds, disputes, and the gateway's limits stated plainly.
Eight gateways are connectable today:
| Gateway | Collects | Payment experience |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Cards and wallets, 31 currencies | Embedded or hosted |
| Adyen | Cards, 33 currencies | Embedded or hosted |
| PayPal | PayPal wallet, 21 currencies | Embedded buttons or hosted |
| GoCardless | Bank debits (Bacs, SEPA, ACH) | Embedded or hosted |
| Authorize.Net | US cards, USD | Hosted |
| Paystack | Cards in five African and US currencies | Embedded popup or hosted |
| Flutterwave | Cards and mobile money, 12 currencies | Hosted |
| Braintree | Cards, per your merchant accounts | Embedded |
Which gateway should you connect?
Pick by where your customers are and how they pay:
- Most businesses start with Stripe: the widest currency list, embedded or hosted experience, and the smoothest test mode.
- Selling across Africa, add Paystack or Flutterwave; Flutterwave also collects mobile money (M-Pesa, MTN Mobile Money and more).
- Collecting UK or European bank debits, or US bank debits by mandate, connect GoCardless.
- Customers who prefer PayPal can pay from their PayPal balance with PayPal alongside your card gateway.
- Adyen suits businesses that already process with Adyen or need currencies Stripe does not settle, such as Bahraini Dinar and Kuwaiti Dinar.
- Authorize.Net suits US businesses with an existing Authorize.Net merchant account.
You can connect more than one at a time. With two or more connected, currency routing decides which gateway collects each currency, and saved cards keep charging through the gateway that saved them.
Moving your saved cards in
If you are switching to yRecurring from another billing system and keeping the same gateway account, your customers' saved cards do not have to be re-entered. With Stripe, GoCardless, Authorize.Net and Paystack, yRecurring reads them straight out of your gateway account: no file, no export. With PayPal, Adyen and Flutterwave it cannot, because those APIs only return saved instruments one customer at a time with no way to list every customer, so you bring the references in as a file instead. Either way nothing is charged and you review everything first. See migrating saved payment methods.
The shape every connection shares
Every gateway page in Settings works the same way, so switching or adding gateways never means relearning the flow. Test and live modes are separate connections with separate keys. A short wizard asks for each credential with directions to where it lives in the gateway's dashboard, verifies the keys against the gateway before saving, and encrypts them at rest. After connecting, a checklist shows what is left, usually webhooks. The full walkthrough is on connecting a payment gateway.
What happens after a charge
However the money is collected, the result lands the same way: the payment is recorded against the invoice, the invoice moves toward paid, and every step of the charge shows in the gateway's activity feed with its outcome and the gateway's own reference. Charges that finish away from your page, like a 3D Secure check or a bank debit that settles days later, are confirmed by the gateway's webhook. If both the customer's return and the webhook go missing, a background check re-reads the charge at the gateway and settles it, so a paid invoice never stays open just because a browser tab closed.
Disputes arrive the same way. A chargeback reported by the gateway shows on the payment's activity trail as it opens, and when it closes against you the money is recorded on the customer's account as a chargeback and written off, with no action needed from you. What that means for the customer's balance, and how to record a chargeback for a gateway that does not report them, is on refunds.
In this chapter
- Stripe Connect Stripe to collect cards and wallets in 31 currencies, embedded on your pages or on Stripe's hosted checkout.
- Adyen Connect Adyen to collect cards in 33 currencies, embedded with Drop-in or on a hosted payment link, with webhooks doing the settling.
- PayPal Let customers pay from their PayPal balance alongside your card gateway, with saved wallets for automatic renewals.
- GoCardless Collect bank debits by mandate over Bacs, SEPA and ACH, with payments that settle over banking days and confirm by webhook.
- Authorize.Net Collect US card payments through your Authorize.Net merchant account, with hosted payment pages and saved customer profiles.
- Paystack Collect cards in Naira, Cedi, Rand, Shilling and US Dollars, with one key to configure and cards saved as they pay.
- Flutterwave Collect cards and mobile money across Africa on Flutterwave's hosted page, with each payment recorded as what it really was.
- Braintree Connect Braintree to collect cards on your own pages with the Drop-in form, with saved cards for automatic renewals.