Firebase payment gateways?
I'm currently evaluating whether Firebase will be suitable for an app I am making. The only potential sticking point I have found is taking payments - what are the options currently available?
Answer
Firebase is a real-time data store, focused on lightning-fast, scalable solutions for sharing data between hundreds to millions of clients simultaneously. It does not offer any payment processing solutions internally.
A third party service like Stripe will integrate quite easily with Firebase, and tools like Zapier can help with pushing data from Stripe back into Firebase upon completion of transactions.
Generally, the process looks something like this:
- User initiates transaction on your site
- Client code sends them to Stripe to enter their CC info
- Client code obtains a token representing the secure transaction
- A server process is notified by stripe when the transaction is validated
- The sever submits the payment authorization with the token
- Stripe sends a transaction receipt to the server process or Zapier, which would be stored back in Firebase
An advantage of this approach is that your are not storing any credit card or sensitive data and therefore are not subject to PCI compliance and stringent bank/e-commerce regulations.