Payment Processing
Our payments integrations allow retailers to optimize for desired shopper experience, speed of deployment, ease of management, and level of integration to match business needs.
Amazon has pre-integrated with selected payment facilitators and offers two options for payment integrations.
The first is a payment service which allows retailers the ability to determine the orchestration of payment calls, ie. Adjust, Capture, Cancel.
The second service delegates the payment orchestration to Amazon while still allowing you to use your preferred payment processor through the use of a Checkout API.
With both options Amazon is not in the funds flow. The relationship is directly between the payment processor and the customer.
Considerations
Based on the desired post purchase experience, customers chose between Amazon vending the receipt and receipt lookup experience vs the customer integrating with their current receipt processes.
Depending on the customer business strategy regarding shopper insufficient funds, the customer can capture partial payment by leveraging the payment service.
For efficient and flexible API interaction, it is recommended to utilize environment variables to store API endpoints and credentials. This approach allows for easy switching between development, testing, and production environments without code redeployment, significantly reducing overhead and simplifying the testing process.
Developers are encouraged to follow best practices including proper error handling, implementing retry logic, and logging API interactions for effective monitoring and debugging.
Note: The payment token has a limited lifespan, which begins at the time of the initial pre-authorization. This expiration period can vary depending on the specific payment processor being used. It is crucial to call the payment service before the token expires, as failure to do so risks the ability to capture the sale. While the exact timeframe may differ based on your payment processor, the token typically expires 46 hours after the shopping trip's initial start time. Once this period has elapsed, it is no longer possible to charge the cart. Attempting to process a cart after the token has expired will result in a ShoppingTripExpiredException being thrown.
Payment Processing overview
The payment flow begins when a customer's cart has been calculated and is ready for final charge processing. This document walks through the API sequence for completing the transaction.
Pre-Authorization Adjustment
When a shopper enters the store, a pre-authorization hold is placed on their payment card. Once the final cart total is calculated, this pre-authorization amount must be adjusted to match the actual purchase amount using the Adjust API.
Verification Process
The Adjust API response verifies whether the shopper's payment method can accommodate the total cart charge.
Successful Adjustments (200 Status Code)
Upon successful adjustment, you'll receive a 200 status code with one of two outcomes:
- Approved Status
- Proceed to capture the payment using the Capture API
- After successful capture, retrieve EMV receipt data using the GetTransactionalData API
- Declined Status
- If you receive a Decline, the response will include
the
authorizedAmountrepresenting the last successful adjustment. You have several options based on your organization's risk tolerance:- Write the entire basket amount to bad debt
- Capture the returned
authorizedAmountand write the remaining balance to bad debt - Perform incremental adjustments to find the maximum approved amount, then write the remaining balance to bad debt
- If you receive a Decline, the response will include
the
Error Handling
- 400 Error: Invalid request parameters
- 429 Error: Rate limiting (observe wait time in response header)
- 500 Error: System error requiring incident response
Get Transactional Data
You will use the get transactional data API method to collect EMV* data for the purpose of providing a customer receipt for the shopping trip as well as backoffice reconciliation.
*EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a global standard for secure payment transactions using a microprocessor chip embedded in credit and debit cards. This chip generates a unique code for each transaction, making it much more difficult to counterfeit cards compared to older magnetic stripe technology
