Payment gateway integration in Costa Rica: BAC vs. Promerica vs. GreenPay

If you’re building an online store in Costa Rica, the first thing you learn is that Stripe doesn’t work here. Neither does Square. Most of the payment infrastructure that US-based tutorials assume you have access to simply doesn’t exist in this market.

What does work: BAC, Promerica, GreenPay, and PayPal. We’ve integrated all four, across multiple client projects, on WooCommerce and custom builds. This is what we’ve learned.

BAC Credomatic

BAC is the biggest bank in Central America. Their payment gateway is the most widely used in Costa Rica. If you’re selling to Costa Rican consumers, most of them have a BAC card.

The good: wide acceptance, consumers trust it, supports both credit and debit cards from most local banks. It’s the safe bet.

The not so good: the integration process is slow. Getting approved as a merchant can take 2-4 weeks. Their API documentation is functional but not what you’d call developer-friendly. The sandbox environment has quirks that don’t match production behavior, so you’ll burn some time on testing that shouldn’t be necessary.

The certification process requires submitting your site for review. BAC checks the checkout flow, security setup, and SSL configuration. Plan for 1-2 rounds of back and forth before you get the green light.

We’ve integrated BAC on at least a dozen WooCommerce projects. The integration itself is straightforward once you’ve done it. The first time takes longer.

Promerica

Promerica is the second largest banking group in the region. Their gateway covers a similar card base to BAC.

In our experience, the certification process is slightly faster than BAC. The API is comparable. The merchant approval process has fewer hoops.

Where Promerica falls short: it has lower market penetration than BAC. Some consumers don’t have a Promerica-compatible card. If you’re only integrating one gateway, BAC gives you broader coverage. If you’re integrating two, adding Promerica alongside BAC covers most of the market.

GreenPay

GreenPay is the modern option. It’s a Costa Rican fintech company that built a gateway specifically for the local market but with a developer experience closer to what you’d expect from Stripe.

The good: cleaner API, better documentation, faster merchant onboarding, and they support multiple currencies. Their dashboard is modern and usable. They also handle PCI compliance on their end, which simplifies your setup.

The trade-off: GreenPay is newer and less recognized by consumers. Some shoppers see the GreenPay checkout screen and hesitate because they don’t recognize the name. This is improving as they grow, but keep it in mind.

We’ve been recommending GreenPay more often in recent projects, especially for clients who value developer experience and speed of integration. For a new e-commerce project starting from scratch, GreenPay is often the fastest path to accepting payments.

PayPal

PayPal works in Costa Rica and is worth adding as a secondary option. International buyers expect it. Some local buyers use it. The integration is well-documented and straightforward.

PayPal alone isn’t enough for a Costa Rica-focused store. Most local consumers pay with bank-issued cards through BAC or Promerica. But as an additional option alongside a local gateway, it broadens your reach.

Our recommendation by project type

Local business selling primarily in Costa Rica: BAC as primary, PayPal as secondary. Widest card coverage for local consumers.

Startup or SaaS with international audience: GreenPay as primary, PayPal as secondary. Faster to integrate, multi-currency support, cleaner developer experience.

E-commerce covering all of Central America: BAC plus GreenPay plus PayPal. Belt and suspenders. Different consumers in different countries prefer different options.

Fintech platform handling recurring payments: talk to us about this one specifically. Recurring billing through local gateways has its own complications (token storage, retry logic, card expiration handling) that deserve a separate conversation.

What the integration process looks like

Regardless of which gateway you choose, expect this timeline:

Week 1: Merchant application and approval. You submit business documents, the gateway provider reviews them, you get credentials.

Week 2: Development. We integrate the gateway into your checkout flow, handle success/failure states, set up webhook listeners for async confirmations.

Week 3: Testing. Sandbox transactions, edge case testing (declined cards, timeouts, partial refunds), cross-browser and mobile testing.

Week 4: Certification and go-live. The gateway provider reviews your implementation, you fix any issues they flag, you go live.

Four weeks end to end is realistic for a clean implementation on WooCommerce. Custom builds may take longer depending on complexity.

If you’re building an e-commerce project in Costa Rica or Central America and want help choosing and integrating the right payment stack, we’ve done this enough times to save you the learning curve.