With so many different payment gateway options out there, it’s not at all uncommon for merchants to switch from one gateway to another. We get questions all the time about how to switch payment gateways and, more importantly, how switching gateways will impact a merchants' billing.

The short answer is that switching gateways shouldn’t have any impact on your billing. Because Recurly securely stores all of your credit card data, switching gateways won't effect your stored billing info. All you need to do is turn the new gateway on, and turn the old gateway off. This will force Recurly to route your payments through the new gateway.

While switching gateways is an easy process, there are a few critical steps you need to follow to ensure your gateways are switched seamlessly and your transactions are not effected. If you ever need to switch gateways, here’s what you need to do:

1) First and foremost, do not disable or remove your active gateway until you’re absolutely ready

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this gets overlooked. You may run into issues when configuring your new gateway that can delay the process. And without an active gateway you obviously can’t process any payments.

2) Configure your new gateway

Go to the Payment Gateways section of your admin console, click the “Add Payment Gateway” button, and configure your new gateway. After configuring the new gateway it’s generally a good rule of thumb to disable it to ensure no payments are accidentally sent through the new gateway before it’s ready.

Recurly Gateway screen

3) Test your gateway configuration

Just as the phrase suggests, this will test your gateway configuration. That said, this is simply a test -- it should catch any glaring issues with your configuration (such as invalid merchant account or API credentials), but if the test is successful it still may not guarantee that you can process payments through the new gateway.

Payment Gateways screen

So even if your configuration test is successful you’ll want to…

4) Run a test transaction using a real credit card (and void the transaction if it’s successful)

If your configuration test is successful, run a test transaction on the new gateway to validate your gateway setup.

When dealing with multiple gateways, Recurly will route payments to the appropriate gateway based on the accepted card type and currency. Beyond that, Recurly will route payments to the oldest, enabled gateway on your site, so in order to run a test transaction you’ll want to temporarily disable your active gateway (and enable the new gateway) to ensure the test transaction is routed through the new gateway. If the test transaction fails you can always turn the old gateway back on (hence the importance of step #1).

FYI, if possible we recommend running test transactions for each of your accepted card types. However if you don't have access to all of your card types it's not the end of the world; typically if one card type is successful, they all are.

5) That’s it!

If your test transaction is successful then you’re good to go. Feel free to leave the new gateway active, or go ahead and disable it (and re-enable your old gateway) until you’re ready.

Of course, if you have any questions or need help don't hesitate to get in touch with us at support@recurly.com.