Take a look at how the payment gateway works in the background.

To keep things simple, we use the 3 phases that a payment gateway goes through:

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In phase 1 the payment is created. The customer selects a payment method (e.g. card payment) and is redirected to the payment gateway. After they enter the card details and confirm the payment with the Pay button, the system receives the payment request. The system then sends a request to approve the payment to the relevant authorisation centre.

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The authorisation centre decides whether to approve the transaction by verifying that all the details about the payment card and its holder are correct, e.g. whether the customer:

If any of these details is incorrect, the bank's authorisation centre declines the payment. From our experience, the most common reasons for a payment being declined are insufficient funds in the customer's bank account and internet payments not being enabled. It often happens that the customer is paying with a new payment card which does not have internet payments enabled by default. The customer has to enable them in their internet banking.

If all the details are correct and nothing stands in the way of the payment, the authorisation centre approves the payment and sends this information to our system. Approval of the payment by the authorisation centre takes a matter of milliseconds.

What happens after the authorisation centre approves the payment?

The payment gateway shows the customer the payment state Paid. At this point our system sends the customer an e-mail notification about the payment state and sends the merchant (i.e. the e-shop) a notification about the payment received. We credit the funds to the merchant's business account and the merchant can start dispatching the goods.

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Once GoPay receives the money from the paying customer, it sends it to the merchant's bank account as part of the settlement, at the frequency set (daily, weekly, monthly).