A cloud-based computing system is provided that includes a payments platform for integrating payment gateway services with a cloud computing platform so that clients of the cloud computing platform can perform payment transactions with customers via the cloud computing platform. The payment gateways that include a particular synchronous payment gateway. The cloud computing platform can include a multitenant database system that provides applications and services to a plurality of clients, and a payments platform module. Each client can be, for example, a tenant or organization of the cloud computing platform that transacts business with one or more customers via a payment gateway. The payments platform module has a pluggable architecture for integrating payment gateway adapters with the cloud computing platform.