Today I have been working on using the PayPoint service to accept credit card payments on a site I am working on.

I have found the integration process to be fairly painless and reasonably secure (using MD5 hashes for both the payment submission request and the callback). Their check out is theme-able using HTML template files, so you can get a lot of flexibility.

For me though, the best thing about PayPoint is that their test system and their live system is the same platform, all you do is pass a different test URL parameter to enable the test mode.

This is so much easier than using a slow sandbox, like PayPal requires you to do.

On the subject of payment gateways, Authorize.Net had a major outage today due to a fire in their data centre. I just checked and they are back on-line now, but their will have taken a major credibility hit for this length of downtime.