In your time in business, you’ve likely experienced some growing pains if you’ve used a premade payment infrastructure. Payment service providers create these pages to serve generic ecommerce needs, so they don’t offer much customization or flexibility.
If you’re looking for a solution that’s tailored to your unique needs, a payment API could be a valuable solution. It can offer the customization your business requires, while still saving you the time of creating a payment infrastructure from the ground up.
In this article, we’ll cover exactly what you can expect from a payment API, as well as the best option on the market now.
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What Is a Payment API?
If you don’t have a tech background, you likely haven’t heard of an API, or application programming interface. However, chances are you’ve used APIs before while shopping online or scrolling on your smartphone.
APIs essentially allow for communication between technical components based on a set of rules. There are different APIs for different technologies. For example, some APIs allow computers to transmit data back and forth. Likewise, there are APIs designed specifically for payments.
These APIs allow the elements of a payment solution to communicate. In other words, payment APIs ensure that your ecommerce platform, apps, payment processor, and gateway can work together. Through this interface, your business can process credit cards and other payment methods.
APIs integrate with your existing website or app code, so your developers can customize it to suit your business needs. This allows you to add hosted payment fields to your own environment, giving you complete control of the user experience without having to create your own payment infrastructure.
How Do Payment APIs Work?
Payment APIs are software tools that interface between the customer’s server and the merchant’s server. Just like how you might interact with a user interface (like a user dashboard on a website), applications or computers interact with APIs.
The best way to understand APIs is to think of them as waiters in a restaurant. The customer (customer server) orders food from the waiter (API). Then the waiter tells the kitchen (merchant server) what the customer wants. After retrieving the food from the kitchen, the waiter delivers it to the customer.
So, when a customer decides to check out on your website, they initiate an API call by hitting the checkout button. That API tells the payment software what action to complete. The API then acts as a middleman between the application and the web server to initiate a transaction.
Payment APIs can help you do more than facilitate transactions. You can also use payment APIs to:
- Accept more payment methods
- Track payment details
- Enable PCI DSS compliance
The Benefits of Using Pay.com's Payment API
With so many payment service providers available, each with its own payment API, it can be hard to decide which is right for your business. Pay.com’s API stands out thanks to its robust capabilities that create a seamless experience for your business and your customers.
Modular Components for Complete Customization
Pay.com is a REST-based API. According to Tray.io, roughly 70% of all public APIs use REST (representational state transfer) because it allows you to easily scale via modular components that don’t affect the system as a whole.
You can break the function of the API down into certain pieces depending on your unique business needs. Pick and choose which resources you want to add to your website or app so you can customize and grow as needed.
Reliable Performance
As we discussed above, REST-based APIs are the top choice in the public space. Scalability aside, REST also allows for incredibly reliable and fast performance.
Rather than requesting data time and time again, REST APIs allow people to store frequently used data on their devices. That means your app or website makes fewer calls, which reduces server load and latency. Put simply, this allows your app or website to be more reliable and responsive.
Embedded Security Features
Pay.com’s APIs come with embedded security features. First, they tell our system to tokenize credit card details in transit. In other words, the system replaces sensitive payment information with a randomized token so that they’re never stored on our servers. So, even in the unlikely event that a hacker got in, they couldn’t steal any credit card numbers as they simply aren’t there.
Second, the APIs are also embedded with 3DS2 (3-Dimension Secure 2.0). 3DS2 is a security protocol that sends a customer’s transaction details to their bank. The bank confirms that the customer is legitimate, and the transaction proceeds as normal. If the bank flags the transaction as potentially fraudulent, the customer must go through a security challenge.
This extra step requires the customer to enter a code sent to their phone or to log into their bank’s app with a biometric. It only takes a few extra seconds but ensures that every customer you work with is legitimate.
These are top-tier security features, baked directly into our API. Your developer team can easily include these measures in your website without spending time or effort setting up separate security strategies.
Speedier Transactions
Pay.com’s APIs allow you to save customer payment details for future transactions. This enables an ultrafast checkout experience for your customers, lowering checkout friction and boosting customer loyalty.
It all works because Pay.com’s API is session-driven. That means it uses temporary unique IDs to authenticate users without forcing them to log in each time they interact with your website.
Instead, you just pass us the ID that you use to recognize the customer, and our system quickly retrieves their saved payment information. The customer can then use the credit card details that the system has already tokenized.
What’s more, you can also store customer card information without making a payment via the Setup Session call. Or, make a payment and store card information at once with the Payment Session call.
Automated Sales
If your business operates on a subscription basis, automation is critical. The Pay.com API includes stored credential flagging (MIT/CIT) as an embedded feature. When a customer signs up for your subscription, the system will automatically begin the transaction each month. That means no more manual processing or tracking down late payments.
More Payment Methods
Pay.com’s API allows you to accept a variety of payment methods, including credit and debit cards, ACH transfers, and digital wallets. That means your customers can pay with popular options like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The more you can cater to customers’ payment preferences, the better your checkout experience.
Offering these payment methods is easy - you can start accepting them with the click of a button on the Pay Dashboard. If you decide they aren’t right for your business, you can stop accepting them just as easily.
Easy Integration
Pay.com works with various third parties to ensure you can integrate the tools and resources that mean the most to your business. The Pay.com API has predictable resource-oriented URLs. It can also accept JSON-encoded request bodies and return JSON-encoded responses.
Plus, you can check out the API for yourself in test mode, which won’t affect your live data or interact with any banking networks.
Affordable, Transparent Pricing
Payment APIs can get quite expensive, especially since they offer such flexible solutions for more advanced businesses. Pay.com offers complete fee transparency - you simply pay a flat-rate, per-transaction fee. What’s more, you only pay for successful transactions. You can track fees on the Pay Dashboard, so there are never any hidden costs or surprise bills.
The Bottom Line
If a prefabricated payment interface is holding your business back, it’s time to make the switch to a payment API. This solution allows you the flexibility and customization you need to improve your customer experience, as well as simplify and speed up transactions. Plus, it allows you to get innovative with your website or app.
With Pay.com’s API, you get a robust payment solution with advanced features, including modular components, impressive reliability, and top-tier security measures. You can automate payments, integrate with your favorite tools, and add the payment methods your customers demand.
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