Braintree Gateway Review

Braintree seems to be everywhere these days. The company is owned by PayPal and boasts clients like AirBNB and StubHub. The Braintree gateway enables online payments for businesses that take cards through ecommerce stores. With Braintree, you can take credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners’ Club, Discover, and JCB), PayPal, Bitcoin, and Apple Pay. Braintree can process split payments, accept payment in multiple currencies, create promotional deals, apply discounts, and more.

Features

Braintree offers several features, including recurring billing, data portability, reporting, API resources, and fraud management.

Recurring Billing and Data Portability
Braintree offers the ability to set up recurring billing if you provide products or services on a weekly or monthly subscription basis. Additionally, if customers change their subscription, Braintree automatically adjusts and prorates the subscription information for you. Failed transaction management options allow you to customize settings to automatically re-submit past-due subscription payments and notify customers of failed transactions with customized emails. Additionally, Braintree offers data portability, meaning you can access customer data even if you end their account with Braintree, ensuring recurring billing isn’t interrupted if you move to a new gateway.

Reporting
Braintree offers a range of reports for ease of managing business. Available reports include settlement batch summaries, transaction summaries, declined transaction reports, 1099-K reporting, and more. Additionally, you can search transactions for specific information.

API resources
Braintree offers a Javascript library and can support a variety of programming languages for integrating services into existing systems.

Integrations
You can either use the Braintree gateway with a Braintree merchant account, or work with another processor. If you have an existing account with a processing company but want to use Braintree to take payments online, you’ll be able to do that. Additionally, Braintree works with many leading e-commerce and billing platforms as well as website shopping carts. 

Security and Fraud Management

For cardholder and business safety, Braintree stores sensitive data in a data vault, reducing the security risks of managing data locally and reducing your PCI compliance scope. There are no separate PCI compliance fees with Braintree. Additionally, Braintree offers Address Verification Services and CVV tools.

With AVS, you can verify that the customer’s address is the same as the address on file with the credit card company and set options in a control panel to reject transactions that don’t pass the verification. With CVV, you can verify that the customer has the credit card by providing the three-digit security code on the back of the card and set options in the control panel to reject non-passing transactions automatically. 

Braintree offers extra protection at no cost with technology to analyze data to detect and prevent fraud. Braintree’s fraud management scans credit card usage, device location, and proxy use for suspicious activity.

Braintree vs. Stripe

Many people wonder about the differences between Braintree and Stripe, two of the most popular payment gateways available. While the services are very similar, there are some differences to be aware of, including Braintree’s ability to function as a gateway with other processors, and Braintree offering a customer service phone number, which Stripe does not. A full comparison of the two services is available in our article Braintree vs. Stripe: Which is Better for Online Payments?

Helpful Links

Manufacturer’s page
FAQs