Electronic Payment System

Executive Summary

Imagine you are enthusiastically shopping on the internet, you take out your Master Card and ready to pay for an item. Suddenly, you find that the merchant only support online payment by Visa card and the also payment procedure is insecure. Would you feel hesitated? Will this experience discourage you to do online shopping in the future?

When we talk about electronic payment methods, it's naturally that some well-known payment methods such as PPS, Paypal, Alipay, etc. come to our minds. The idea of online electronic payment is simply not new to us. With the development of the internet and e-commerce, the ability to send information is now incredibly fast. Companies have realized this fact and have used the Internet as a tool to expand their businesses. For businesses who want to take advantage of e-commerce, payment gateway can be a useful ecommerce tool. It changes our way of life, and how we conduct business. With the growing demand of online financial transaction, payment gateway is the solution to facilitate electronic payment service through the Internet.

Payment gateway is provided by e-commerce application service provider to settle payment between merchants and customers. It is identical to a physical POS terminal in most of the retailers. Besides supporting different currencies and card types, it is also a secure payment platform. Personal information such as credit card details are encrypted and passed securely to the merchant and to the payment processor. Hence, Internet payment gateway facilitates financial transactions.

In this project, I will go through this kind of service in details including the background of payment gateway, how it works, technological model, etc. Moreover, I will study the payment gateway service in Hong Kong and see whether it is successful in this city.

Agenda

1. Background of payment gateway

This section will give an introduction of payment gateway to let reader have an understanding on this service.

2. Why use payment gateway

This section will explore why there's growing importance and need of payment gateway service

3. How payment gateway works

This section will analyze the mechanism of payment gateways and the procedure of the whole purchase and transaction process.

3.1 Infrastructure/technological model/payment network

This section will go through the technological model and architecture of payment gateway service will be explored.

4. Security

This section will cover