Bank acquiring, wallets or a gateway: how to take payments online in Armenia

Before you write a line of checkout code, one question decides most of the work ahead: how does money get from your buyer to your bank account? In Armenia there are three practical answers, and they are not mutually exclusive. You can sign for card acquiring with a bank, you can sign with the wallets, or you can put all of them behind one checkout with a gateway. This post walks through what each route asks of you, in the order you will meet it.

Route 1: card acquiring through an ARCA member bank

Armenian debit and credit cards run on the ARCA network, and Visa and Mastercard cards are processed through ARCA and its member acquiring banks. To accept them online you sign an internet acquiring contract with a bank. Each member bank is its own processor with its own credentials: Ameriabank, Inecobank, Evocabank, Converse Bank, AraratBank, ACBA, AmioBank, IDBank, Ardshinbank and others.

What the bank hands you is small: an API username and an API password for the payment gateway. Ameriabank's gateway also issues a Client ID alongside them. That is the whole credential set for card payments, and it is why bank acquiring feels deceptively simple at the start.

Two details are worth knowing before you sign:

• Some banks answer only from registered addresses. At least one Armenian acquirer, Inecobank, accepts payment requests only from IP addresses it has whitelisted for your merchant account. Whoever runs the server that talks to the gateway has to hand that address to your bank contact, and until they register it every payment through that provider fails.
• The acquiring fee is between you and the bank. A gateway does not change your card processing rate. Settlement also stays between you and the bank: your acquirer pays you directly.

Card acquiring reaches any buyer holding a card, and it is the route that brings 3-D Secure into the picture, which is a subject of its own.

Route 2: wallet contracts with Idram and Telcell

Wallets work differently. The buyer does not type a card number at all: they are sent to the wallet, they confirm the payment there, and they come back to your site. For a shop that sells to Armenian consumers, wallets are not a niche add-on, they are how a large share of everyday payments already happen.

You sign with each wallet separately, and each gives you a different pair of credentials:

• Idram issues an EDP Account ID (the field is often labelled EDP_REC_ACCOUNT) and a secret key. Idram also needs to register three URLs against your merchant account: a Result URL, a Success URL and a Fail URL. The Result URL is the important one. Without it Idram has no way to confirm your payments.
• Telcell issues a Shop ID and a Shop Key.

Two things about wallets shape how you build. Neither Idram nor Telcell offers a public test environment, so you cannot rehearse against a sandbox that the wallet itself runs. And neither exposes a status API you can poll, so the confirmation the wallet sends is what settles a payment. There is no second source of truth to fall back on later, which makes a reliable, always-reachable callback endpoint non negotiable.

Route 3: one gateway in front of all of them

The third route is to keep the contracts from routes 1 and 2 and stop integrating them one at a time. A gateway sits between your store and each processor, so you build one checkout and turn methods on and off from a dashboard.

This is what Paynet does. You create one payment with one request, the buyer picks a method on the hosted checkout from everything you have enabled for that domain, and you get one signed webhook and one dashboard for all of it:

POST /api/v1/payments
{ "amount": 15000, "order_id": "ORD-1", "return_url": "https://shop.am/thanks" }

Redirect the buyer to the checkout_url that comes back. Amounts are whole Armenian dram, and the currency is AMD. If you would rather not send the buyer to a hosted page, the JavaScript SDK opens the same checkout inline or as a modal, and payment links with a QR code let you take money with no website at all.

The important point for a shop owner: a gateway of this kind does not stand between you and your money. You keep your own contracts with each bank and wallet, you paste those credentials into your own Paynet account, and the bank settles to you as it always would. Paynet never holds the funds.

What is the same on every route

Some work does not go away no matter which route you choose, so budget for it once:

• Business verification. Live payments start after your business is verified. Until then everything runs in test mode, free and unlimited.
• A domain you can prove you own. Buyers can only pay on a verified domain. Verification takes a DNS TXT record, a file at your site root, or the automatic check a store plugin performs when you click Connect. Note that localhost cannot be verified, so verify your staging hostname before you test from it.
• Confirming payments properly. Never mark an order paid because the buyer landed back on your thank-you page. Treat the webhook as a nudge, verify its HMAC-SHA256 signature over the raw body, dedupe on delivery_id, then read the real state back with GET /api/v1/orders/{order_id}/payment.
• Late confirmations. A payment that looked failed or expired can still be confirmed afterwards. Act on the latest state you read, not on the first webhook you saw.
• Fiscal receipts. Which brings us to the piece most people leave until last.

The part that is easy to forget: e-HDM

Armenian sales need an electronic fiscal receipt from an e-HDM, an electronic cash register registered with the tax service (SRC). It is a separate registration with its own paperwork: you file form 101, the "Application for HDM registration" (code u6), in the SRC e-filing system, attaching a certificate signing request, and after approval you upload the certificate you are given.

Paynet generates the keypair and the CSR for you, keeps the private key encrypted, and issues receipts automatically for successful payments once the e-HDM is active. You can also print receipts manually from the dashboard for sales taken elsewhere. If you plan to sell online in Armenia, decide early who is handling this, because it is the part that turns a working checkout into a compliant one.

What it costs

Compare the routes on total cost, not on one line item. Your bank charges its acquiring fee and the wallets charge theirs, under the contracts you sign with them. Paynet's own pricing sits on top and is deliberately boring: 20 AMD per completed live payment and 3 AMD per standalone fiscal receipt, in whole dram, with no monthly fee and no percentage.

A few consequences of that model are worth knowing while you are still choosing:

• Payments under 500 AMD are free, as are failed payments, all test payments and refunds.
• A receipt issued for a payment that went through Paynet is free. You pay 3 AMD only for standalone receipts.
• Units are bought in advance and never expire. Every new account starts with 200 transactions and 500 receipts.
• Everyone pays the same per unit at any volume, and a price change is announced 30 days ahead and never touches units you already own.

The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

A short checklist before you sign anything

1. Which methods do your buyers actually want: cards, Idram, Telcell, or all three?
2. Who at your company owns the bank contract and can chase an IP whitelist request?
3. Who owns the e-HDM registration and knows your tax regime?
4. Does your platform have a ready plugin, or will a developer build the integration?
5. How will you test before real money moves?

If the answer to question 4 is WooCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Tilda or Ecwid, the ready-made route is on the plugins page. If a developer is building it, the developer guide and the API reference have the whole flow, including a sandbox with test cards for every outcome.

What to do next

• Decide which methods you need, then ask each bank or wallet for the merchant contract. You will be asked for those credentials, not by us, but by your own dashboard.
• Open a free Paynet account and verify the domain you sell from. Test mode works immediately, with unlimited free test payments.
• Add the Sandbox provider and take a test payment end to end before your bank paperwork is even finished.
• Start the e-HDM registration in parallel. It is the longest pole in the tent, since a tax officer has to approve the application.
• Stuck on any of it, write to [email protected].

Idram, Telcell, ARCA and the bank names above are trademarks of their respective owners. Paynet is an independent payment gateway operated by Digital Brains LLC in Yerevan.