Pay API for e-commerce - Overview

What is it?

There's a new feature available for you now to facilitate payments - Pay API. Pay API is an API for e-commerce that's intended for use by PAR Ordering business partners.

Who can use it?

The possible use of this interface is pretty broad, which makes it widely applicable. Here are some of the scenarios:

• a Client (like you) integrating a Payment Provider into PAR Ordering with their own resources
• a Payment Provider directly integrating into PAR Ordering
• an agency hired by us or by the client integrating a Payment Provider into PAR Ordering

How does it work?

Let's get a tiny bit technical (just for a moment!):

The API exposes basic payment gateway functionality. That includes credit card tokenization and payment processing for different payment method types. It 'wraps' around the local Payment Provider API. In other words, Pay API requires a third party to implement a proxy server that will receive Pay API-specific requests. The proxy should transform and forward all the requests to the local payment provider API. Then, responses received from the local payment provider API need to be transformed by the proxy to the Pay API-specific responses and returned back to the PAR Ordering server.

Now lets break this down:

Long story short, it's like a back-and-forth translations. A third-party (meaning: not PAR Ordering) implements a 'translator' (proxy server) that translates our requests to the Payment Provider and returns to us with responses in a format that our 'layer' understands.
So what the Pay API does is it acts as a 'mediator' that coordinates these 'translations' between us and the Payment Provider. Meaning: sends information to the 'translator' in the format that we define and then receives and processes responses from that translator in a format we understand.