Best Payment Gateways for your OpenCart Store

Posted by Will Wakeford on May 7, 2026

Choosing a payment gateway is an essential task if you sell online, and can be difficult with so many options available. It's important to find the right one for your business as it shapes the checkout experience, and they come with differing fees. Here are our top 4 payment gateways to use on your OpenCart store:

1. Stripe
https://stripe.com/

Stripe is the most popular payment gateway for businesses. It provides a super easy and fast checkout experience, it's developer friendly and supports a large amount of payment methods. Stripe is a common choice for business who want to provide a seamless or custom checkout experience.

Stripe provide detailed developer docs and flexible APIs, making it very dev-friendly.

There's no built-in Stripe extension for OpenCart, but there are plenty of third-party extensions which provide integration.

2. PayPal
https://www.paypal.com/

PayPal is another solid choice for a payment gateway. It's one of the most recognised brands in ecommerce, and many customers trust it. It also comes with OpenCart out of the box - the PayPal extension allows for a good amount of front-end customisation to help improve user experience.

PayPal also allows customers to pay with their PayPal account, and gives them access to Pay Later options. Giving customers more purchasing options is likely to increase conversion rates.

3. Viva
https://www.viva.com/

Viva is a payment gateway that we've used ourselves before and found it to be reliable and easy to use. One of the benefits of using Viva is that it accepts payments for higher risk products (e.g. vapes, adult toys), which might be required depending on your business.

Viva provide an OpenCart extension that allows you to accept payments via Viva Smart Checkout.

4. Mollie
https://www.mollie.com/

Mollie is another payment gateway that we've had a great experience with as developers. The gateway is reliable and easy to use/get set up - Mollie provide an OpenCart extension for free on the marketplace. Mollie provides an integrated payment environment, so customers don't leave the page to enter their card details.

It's worth noting that an integrated payment environment may open you up to PCI compliance matters - if you want to know more check out our other blog here.

How Do They Compare?

	User Experience	Fees (Standard UK Cards)	Fees (Commercial UK Cards)	OpenCart Integration
Stripe	OpenCart checkout page integration.	1.5% + 20p	1.9% + 20p	Actively updated extensions available on the marketplace, for a one-off fee.
PayPal	OpenCart checkout page integration. External page for PayPal wallet.	2.9% + 30p	2.9% + 30p	Comes installed with OpenCart.
Viva	Checkout page redirection.	2.19% + 24p	2.06% + 24p	Extension provided by Viva, however this is no longer supported.
Mollie	OpenCart checkout page integration.	1.2% + 20p	2.9% + 20p	Extension provided by Mollie.