Payment Gateways

Overview

A Payment Gateway enables businesses to accept online payments from customers securely. It acts as a bridge between the business, the payment processor, and the customer’s bank, managing the transaction flow from payment authorization to fund settlement.

In Zoho Creator, payment transactions are powered by Zoho Checkout, which connects your applications to various third-party payment gateways without the need for manual setup or direct API integrations. Zoho Creator also supports configuring multiple payment gateways within a single account, allowing businesses to route transactions through different providers based on application needs, customer preferences, or region-specific requirements. This setup enhances flexibility and gives developers centralized control without relying on complex code or external systems.

Admins or developers of a Zoho Creator account can link authorized payment gateways to payment workflows, enabling automated responses to successful or failed transactions across applications.

Availability

• Only the super admin can configure Zoho Checkout, which serves as a prerequisite for payment gateway.
• Admins and developers can configure payment gateways and link them to app workflows.
• Admins can also enable or restrict access for specific applications.
• The live users can make use of the payment gateways to transact in their account.
• The availability of specific payment gateways depends on your data center and the country/currency selected in Zoho Checkout configuration.

Role of Zoho Checkout in Zoho Creator

• Acts as an intermediary between Creator apps and payment providers, abstracting the complexity of individual gateway integrations.
• Offers a guided UI to configure and manage supported gateways, eliminating the need to implement separate APIs for each service.
• Handles secure transaction processing on your behalf without exposing sensitive payment data to the app environment.
• Ensures compliance with industry standards, such as PCI DSS, for safe handling of customer payment information.

Business use cases

Use case 1

Let’s assume you run a training institute and use Zoho Creator to manage course registrations and payments. By configuring Razorpay as a payment gateway through Zoho Checkout and linking it to a payment workflow, you can fully automate the registration process. When a participant submits the Course Registration form, the workflow triggers a payment request via Razorpay and redirects the participant to complete the payment. 
Once the transaction is successful, the workflow

• Updates the Course Enrollment form with the participant's payment status
• Sends a confirmation email
• Grants access to course materials

This setup reduces manual effort and ensures that only participants who have successfully paid are enrolled and granted access, streamlining the entire registration experience.

Use case 2

In another scenario, a real estate business using Zoho Creator can automate monthly rent collection by configuring a payment gateway such as Cashfree or PayPal. When a tenant submits the Rent Payment form, a payment request is automatically initiated and processed through the selected gateway. 

Once the payment is successful, the workflow:

• Updates the relevant Rent Records form
• Sends a digital receipt to the tenant
• Optionally sets a reminder for the next payment cycle.

This reduces manual tracking, improves payment accuracy, and ensures a consistent and efficient rent collection process.

Available payment gateways

The following are the payment gateways available across Zoho Creator's data centers. View the countries that support these services
 

Points to note

• You can configure multiple payment gateways in your Creator account.
• Payment gateway availability depends on the country and currency configured in Zoho Checkout.

Related topics

Understand Payment Workflows