How to easily and quickly add the Comgate payment gateway to your WooCommerce store?

The Czech payment gateway Comgate focuses primarily on providing reliable and affordable services for small and medium-sized e-shops. A wide range of payment methods, easy integration, low fees, and many useful features make it popular among store owners and shoppers alike.

Why choose the Comgate payment gateway for your WooCommerce store?

By implementing the Comgate payment gateway in your store, you can offer customers several popular payment methods:

• card payment
• online bank buttons for Czech, Slovak, and Polish banks
• QR payments
• digital wallets (Google Pay, Apple Pay)
• installment payments
• recurring payments (for selling subscriptions via WooCommerce Subscriptions)

A major advantage of this payment gateway is the option to choose between the inline and redirect variants.

An inline payment gateway allows customers to make payments in a pop-up window directly on your store, while redirect sends them to another website to complete the payment. We wrote about which option to choose for your store in the article Inline payment gateway vs. redirect: which is better for an e-shop?

You can use Comgate in 10 currencies and 12 languages, so selling to international customers is not a problem.

How to get the Comgate payment gateway?

Have you decided to get this payment gateway for your store? The process looks like this:

• First, you need to submit a request to Comgate.
• Comgate then reviews your store.
• Next comes the proposal and signing of the contract.
• After the contract is successfully signed, you can implement the payment gateway in WooCommerce using a plugin.

Let’s go through it step by step.

1. Request

Go to https://www.comgate.cz/. In the top-right corner of the website, click the “Request service” button.

You will now be redirected to the request form, where you will fill in:

• your first and last name
• your email address and phone number
• company name and company ID
• whether you are interested in a payment gateway, a payment terminal, or both
• expected monthly payment volume

Click “Submit” to send the form. Now you just need to wait until Comgate contacts you with more information.

2. Additional information and store review

After submitting your request, a Comgate representative will contact you and ask for additional information:

• company name and company ID
• address (street, house number, ZIP/postal code, city, country)
• contact details (email and phone number)
• bank account number where funds will be transferred
• line of business (what products or services you sell)
• store URL (or the name and address of your physical location if you also want a terminal)
• name (company name) of the developer who is building your store

Signing a contract with a payment gateway provider is not automatic. Your store must first pass a review to confirm it contains everything required and does not violate any cooperation terms set by card schemes, the Czech National Bank, and the Ministry of Finance.

What must an e-shop include to meet the requirements for setting up a payment gateway?

Your store should meet legal requirements. This means it should include:

• the operator’s name and contact details
• legally correct and complete product information (see the article E-shop obligations: do you know what you must state for the products you sell?)
• terms and conditions (especially delivery, payment, and complaint/returns terms)
• information about personal data protection (GDPR)

In addition, the product range you sell is also important. Some business segments or specific products are subject to increased scrutiny or are not approved by card schemes at all, for example:

• illegal activities
• medicines, dietary supplements, nutrition counseling
• addictive substances, alcohol, tobacco, hemp products
• political parties, movements, churches, sects
• erotica, pornography
• pawn shops
• weapons and ammunition

…and more. You can find the complete list at https://help.comgate.cz/docs/en/permitted-countries-and-services1.

The country of operation is also important. Entities from countries other than the Czech Republic and Slovakia are subject to individual approval.

3. Signing the contract

If your store passes the review successfully, Comgate will prepare the contract including a price offer.

If you agree with the contract proposal, you can proceed to sign the contract online. For this, Comgate will need:

• scans of two identity documents
• proof of account ownership (e.g., a screenshot from online banking with the header showing account details)
• making an identification payment of 1 CZK
• providing the company’s beneficial owner
• a declaration of the country where the business is based

The contract will be sent to you by email, and once approved you will receive access to the Comgate client portal. Now it’s time to integrate the payment gateway into your store.

4. Implementing the Comgate payment gateway in WooCommerce

After signing the contract, you can start integrating the Comgate payment gateway into your store. The entire integration process takes place in these steps:

• purchasing the Comgate plugin and activating it
• entering implementation details into the plugin and the Comgate client portal
• configuring payment methods
• making test payments

4.1 Purchasing the Comgate plugin and activating it

The Comgate plugin is used to easily implement this payment gateway in a WooCommerce store. Thanks to it, you can offer all payment methods and features supported by this payment gateway at checkout, both in inline and redirect mode.

After purchasing the plugin, install and activate it using the license key, just like other WordPress plugins. The plugin also comes with documentation to guide you through the entire implementation, and customer support can help you resolve any issues.

4.2 Entering implementation details

For your store to communicate with the payment gateway and vice versa, you need to enter the implementation details.

In the Comgate client portal, you must enter:

• IP addresses of the server where your store is hosted
• URLs for a successful payment, cancelled payment, pending/unresolved payment, and for passing the payment result – you can find these URLs directly in the plugin and in its documentation

In the Comgate client portal, you will obtain and copy into the Comgate payment method settings in WooCommerce:

• store ID (store connection identifier)
• secure key (password)

You can see the whole process clearly in the following video:

4.3 Configuring payment methods

After connecting to the Comgate system, the plugin loads the available payment methods and you can now set which payment methods will be shown to customers and in what order. You can also restrict their availability by country, shipping method, and product type.

You can find these settings under WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Comgate. The plugin documentation will guide you through the setup in detail.

Recurring payments and installment payments require additional approval, so if you want to use them in your store, you need to contact Comgate and request approval (if you haven’t already). To enable recurring payments in a WooCommerce store, you will also need the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

4.4 Making test payments

Before going live, you need to make test payments. In the Comgate payment method settings, switch to “Test” mode, in which the tester is redirected to a virtual bank rather than a real one, and no money is debited from the account.

In the Comgate client portal, you will find an overview of all test payments to verify they went through correctly, a log (a record of communication between the payment gateway and the store), and technical documentation that will help you. After you finish testing successfully, don’t forget to turn off test mode.

4.5 Final approval

After testing, contact Comgate. They will review the test payments and the payment gateway integration and request approval from the card scheme. This process takes around 14 days. During this period, you can use the gateway for bank button payments, but not for card transactions.

Once you are informed that approval has been granted, your Comgate payment gateway will be fully operational and you can start accepting payments through it without restrictions.

As you can see, integrating the Comgate payment gateway into a WooCommerce store is not complicated. Even without programming knowledge, you can easily do it using the Toret Comgate plugin. Offer your customers convenient payments with this gateway today.