Here’s jotting down points that you should know/consider while integrating Payment Gateway for a site that is based in GCC/Middle East (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates).
Mentioned below are some of the issues we came across while integrating K-Net Payment Gateway and how we resolved the same for Kuwait based E-Commerce website/business.
Audio file of this article
First and foremost, we should be aware that popular US based Payment Gateways like – Authorise.net and Stripe is unavailable for GCC.
For Kuwait, there are Payment Gateways like K-Net/MyFatoorah.
Our client chose K-Net and here’s explaining the process that worked for us.
K-Net Payment Gateway works only with specific SSL certificates and the SSL certificate list will be shared by them. And we have to purchase/subscribe to one of the suggested SLL.
We chose to read all about all the SSL certificates suggested for K-Net PG. Going through user’s experience and reviews did throw some light on what may not work for us. Based on all the data collected, we decided to go with DigiCert (DigiCert is one for the SLL certificate options in K-Net PG list).
Frankly, DigiCert was a good choice. DigiCert provides clear installation documentation and also has a very helpful customer support team.
When you register for SSL, make sure to register with Client’s/Business owner’s contact information and postal address. This is very important because SSL provider (like in our case DigiCert) has their own customer/business verification protocol. Business owner is asked to fill in a form which is in Arabic and they also conduct telephonic verification. We, web developers may not be of any help for the above-mentioned protocol, so it’s better that SSL certificate is directly purchased by the business owner.
Where should the site be hosted when using K-Net PG?
Unlike other PGs (Authorise.net, Stripe), K-Net DOES NOT work on shared hosting. Site HAS to be on a dedicated host. Dedicated host should NOT have any other SSL installed on it. This is very important.
Our site was initially on shared hosting and K-Net’s integration kit just wouldn’t work. And we kept thinking that we were making some mistake in the installation process. And we ended up spending a lot of time figuring this installation issue. We didn’t receive a good and constructive help from K-Net customer support, and we lost a huge chunk of time here.
It so happened that we took a decision to try dedicated host and PG integration kit effortlessly got installed there. It would have been very helpful if K-Net had mentioned this as one of the criteria or even if the support had thrown some light here.
We implemented KNet Payment Gateway for a WordPress website, so K-Net definitely supports Linux OS and PHP Website.
Please Note: As of now Woocommerce/WordPress does not have any KNet Payment Gateway plugin. We modified our WordPress site and got K-Net Payment Gateway to effortlessly work on our WordPress/Woocommerce website. Sort of our own custom K-Net Payment Gateway plugin for Woocommerce website.
Moving the site from shared hosting to dedicated
This was a big call for us, because
a. We didn’t know if our PG integration kit will even work in dedicated host.
b. The difference of hosting cost between shared to dedicated was very high.
Even though our WP site was all set to go live, even though we were a little anxious to disturb the site at this juncture, considering the cost difference, we boldly decided to move the WP site to AWS cloud. This was a good decision too.
After a couple of research and speaking to friends, we decided to host our site on AWS Bitnami t2 micro instance.
AWS Bitnami t2 micro instance is free for a year. Worked perfect! And post first year, you may have to spend around USD120/annum for hosting, which is also extremely reasonable.
And if you are new to installing WordPress on AWS Bitnami, here’s our tutorial for the same.
Creating AWS instance with correct settings, installing WP/SSL on AWS instance may not be successful at first go. Please do not be disheartened, I feel it is all about getting familiar and understanding the nitty-gritties of AWS cloud and instance creation process. Just stay there and patiently read through all the instructions. And if you have any failed installations, make sure to delete all that you have created before trying fresh installation. You may have to delete things like AWS instance, Public elastic IP. Leave no clutter 🙂
Our solution for AWS site back-up
Since our site was now on AWS Bitnami free version. Our next concern was regular site back-up and we wanted a tool that would do this for us. So for Back-up, we subscribed to CodeGuard, and it is working fine till now.
Hope this article was helpful to you!
And if you require any help in installing/setting-up your K-Net Payment Gateway, E-Commerce/Woocommerce website development, you can reach us at reachout[at]imajineweb.com. We would love to work with you on your website development project.