A payment gateway is the service that takes a customer's payment on your behalf, checks it with their bank or UPI app, confirms to you that the money is approved, and settles it to your bank account a day or two later. It is what sits behind a payment link, a "pay now" button on a store page, or an online checkout. In India a gateway typically handles UPI, debit and credit cards, net banking and wallets through one integration, charges a per-transaction fee, and gives you a dashboard of transactions, refunds and settlements.
Why it matters
For a food business the gateway solves one specific problem: knowing, without a screenshot, that an order is paid. A UPI QR on the counter moves money, but nothing tells your ordering system that order 143 is settled; staff check a phone and hope the screenshot is real. A gateway confirms the payment back to the software automatically, so the order can go to the kitchen the moment the customer pays. It also lets you take advance payments for cakes and catering, and issue refunds without a bank visit. The costs are laid out in payment gateway charges in India, and the verification problem in how restaurants verify UPI payments.
Example
A customer orders ₹800 of food on a store page and taps pay. The gateway shows UPI, cards and net banking; the customer picks UPI and approves in their UPI app. Within seconds the gateway tells the ordering software the payment succeeded, the order is marked paid and a KOT prints in the kitchen. If the customer had paid by card at a 2 percent fee, ₹16 plus GST on the fee would be deducted and about ₹781 would land in the restaurant's account on the next working day under a T+1 settlement. On 1,500 such orders a month, the gateway fee is a few thousand rupees, against the cost of a staff member spending an hour a day matching screenshots to orders.
On Tezzu, UPI and card payments go through Razorpay, cash on delivery is a separate option, and you can connect your own Razorpay account for zero platform fee on payments.