A Beginner's Guide to Setting Up Online Payment Gateways
July 3, 2026 · Devhuset Team
Every online purchase, no matter how simple it looks to the customer, involves a small chain of technical handoffs between your website, a payment gateway, and a bank. Understanding roughly how that chain works, even without writing a line of code, makes it much easier to choose the right combination of payment options for your own site.
What a Payment Gateway Actually Does
A payment gateway's core job is to securely capture a customer's payment details and pass them along to the relevant banks and card networks for approval, without your website ever needing to directly store sensitive card data itself. That last part matters enormously: handling raw card numbers yourself would expose your business to serious security and compliance obligations, so nearly every modern payment setup is designed specifically to keep that responsibility with the payment provider instead.
How Stripe Works
Stripe is built primarily for developers, offering a set of APIs and pre-built interface components that a website can embed directly into its own checkout flow. When a customer enters their card details, Stripe's own secure, hosted fields capture that information directly, so it never actually passes through your website's own servers. Stripe then handles authorization with the customer's bank, and returns a simple success or failure response your site can react to. That developer-first design is why Stripe has become a common default choice for custom-built websites and web applications.
How PayPal Works
PayPal takes a slightly different approach, built around its own existing wallet system. Rather than entering card details directly on your site, a customer is typically redirected to PayPal, or shown an embedded PayPal window, to log in and approve the payment from their existing PayPal balance, linked card, or bank account. Because so many online shoppers already have a PayPal account they trust, offering it alongside other options can reduce hesitation at checkout, particularly for customers who are cautious about entering card details on a smaller or less familiar site.
How Apple Pay Works
Apple Pay relies on a technique called tokenization. Instead of transmitting a customer's actual card number, the customer's device generates a one-time-use token representing that transaction, authorized using Face ID, Touch ID, or a device passcode. Your website, or app, never sees the real card number at all, only this token, which is then processed by your payment gateway of choice. Because the checkout happens with a single biometric confirmation rather than typing out card details, Apple Pay tends to convert especially well on mobile devices, where typing is more cumbersome.
Most gateways also include built-in fraud detection, flagging unusual transaction patterns before they're approved, which is one more reason few businesses attempt to build this kind of infrastructure themselves rather than relying on an established provider.
Most modern websites don't have to choose just one of these. Stripe, PayPal, and Apple Pay are frequently offered side by side, often through the same underlying integration, since payment providers increasingly support multiple methods through one setup. The practical goal isn't picking the "best" gateway in the abstract; it's giving your customers a checkout that feels familiar and fast to them, in whatever form that takes.