Once your customer has placed an order, the payment gateway verifies the customer’s card details, and checks if they have enough funds in their account to pay you. For online merchants, a payment gateway relays the information from you, the merchant, to the acquirer and the issuing bank using data encryption to keep unwanted threats away from the sensitive card data. This entire complex authorisation and communication process happens in the background, and can take a matter of seconds!

Businesses use online payment gateways because they ensure safe and smooth transactions, and reduce losses associated with late payments. Aside from fraud management, a payment gateway also protects merchants from expired cards, insufficient funds, closed accounts or exceeding credit limits. The key points are authorisation, security, settlement and reporting.

The entire Yoco ecosystem is internationally recognised and certified as secure by Visa, MasterCard, and we're also fully PCI compliant. All online payments through Yoco are backed by 3D secure, and we employ SSL certification throughout.

We're also particularly proud of our sophisticated risk monitoring technology, and dedicated team of cybercrime busting experts that monitor, detect, and deal with fraud and risky activity in the Yoco ecosystem.

An application programming interface (API) key is a code used to identify and authenticate an application or user. They also act as a unique identifier and provide a secret token for authentication purposes.

In other words, APIs are interfaces that help define how pieces of software interact with each other, by controlling how requests are made between programs, and in which data formats.

They form an integral part of setting up your secure payment gateway integration on your website, however Shopify handles the API keys in the background, so when you install the Shopify payments plugin, your website is linked automatically to your Yoco business profile.

Nope, you can sign up and start accepting payments on your website in minutes by clicking here. No need to buy a card machine and no setup or other initial costs. All you’ll pay is our standard transaction fees, when you start selling.

For online payments, our transaction fees range from 2.55% to 2.95% for Visa/Mastercard payments, and for international cards it ranges between 3% and 3.4% - depending on your turnover and fees package. Online payments incur a minimum fee of R2.26 per transaction. Instant EFT has a fixed 2% (ex VAT) fee - with same day settlement.

The more you transact, the less you pay.

With Yoco, you can accept all MasterCard and VISA debit and credit cards. This includes international and AMEX cards, swipe cards, chip and PIN, and SASSA cards. Issued from any bank. Unfortunately, we don't currently accept Fleet / RCS / Diners / Petrol cards.

Yoco only accepts payments in South African Rands (ZAR). This means that goods or services need to be listed in ZAR on your website. Customers can pay with an international card, but because Yoco accepts ZAR only, the customer's bank will do an automatic currency conversion from the customer's home currency into ZAR.

Sure they can. They’ll be purchasing ZAR-based products, so the relative amount based on the daily exchange rate at the time of purchasing will be deducted from their bank account. The customer's bank will determine the exchange rate and possibly add fees. These are out of our control.

A maximum of 2 business days. You also get instant email notifications when a payment is made on your website, and can track it all through the Yoco App or Business Portal.

For card payments it's just R2! Any payment less than R2 will fail and your customer will receive an error message. There's no minimum amount on EFTs.

Yes! The transaction fee is 2% ex VAT per transaction.

Yes! Apple Pay is a secure and seamless online payment method with Yoco.

Yoco Gateway does not support subscriptions / recurring billing at the moment. Our team is working hard to make this feature available soon.