Welcome to Payabli! This guide gives you the foundational knowledge you need to get started with your Payabli integration. Taking the time to read through this page now to get oriented can help you get started even faster with Payabli.

This guide starts off with the basic process between signing up with Payabli and getting your first merchant on board. Then, in Learn the lingo, we cover some Payabli concepts that people new to Payabli may have trouble understanding at first. In the Tokens and test accounts section, we briefly cover some of the tools you’ll need to build and test your integration.

Okay, let’s get started.

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The basics, start to finish

Your goal with Payabli is to go live, onboard your merchants, and start monetizing your money in and money out transactions. The process between signing up and going live looks like this:

1

Choose integration style

Payabli offers a couple of ways to integrate with our products. You can pick one, or you can use a hybrid approach. These options have different required resources, security implications, features, and integration challenges.

Direct access APIs

Accept payments, manage customers and subscriptions, build products, address payment disputes, and onboard merchants while maintaining total control over your user experience. This method may require more work from you to meet PCI compliance.

Prebuilt embedded UI components

Seamlessly embed intuitive payment forms that securely capture payment data to generate a token. The token replaces sensitive cardholder or bank account data you can use with the direct access APIs to make transactions. This method dramatically reduces the PCI compliance footprint, with minimal impact to the customer experience.

Reporting and statistics APIs

Use webhooks to receive near real-time notifications of events happening on a processing account. Use webhooks alongside the Query API to let software partners to pull detailed payments data from the Payabli platform. You can also use the statistics API to build rich dashboards and analytics into your system.

2

Build, test, go live

During your integration kickoff, we give you access to the sandbox environment. You’ll learn more in your integration kickoff, but the idea is to use the sandbox to build Payabli into your product and test it.

The sandbox lets you:

  • Make test payments.
  • Simulate boarding paypoints and managing a portfolio.
  • Customize Payabli’s embedded components to mimic your UX.
  • Set up payment devices and test card-present transactions.
  • Experiment with reports and notifications.

The docs can really help you understand what features are available to you and how you can include them with your integration.

After you’ve tested thoroughly, our solution engineering team will certify your integration and give you production access.

3

Board merchants

When your integration is live, you can start boarding merchants. Merchants must apply using a boarding link that’s generated from a boarding template, when they submit the form, it becomes a boarding application, and Payabli works on underwriting and will either approve or deny the merchant. When approved, a boarding application converts the merchant into a paypoint, which can then process payments with Payabli.

This is just barely scratching the surface of the merchant boarding process, so see Board Merchants to learn more.

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Learn the lingo

Before you start building, we recommend that you get to know some of Payabli’s terminology. We have a comprehensive glossary, but let’s go over the terms you’ll see a lot during your integration.

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Entities

Entities make up Payabli’s hierarchy. You add and manage entities with PartnerHub and the API. Entities include paypoints, organizations, customers, and vendors.

  • Paypoints are merchants.
  • Organizations are used group and manage paypoints.
  • Customers are the people spending money with your merchants.
  • Vendors are the folks you and your paypoints pay for goods and services (like the carpet cleaners, office supply folks, and so on).

This is just a high-level overview of entities, so you can learn more about them in the Entities guide.

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Entrypoint

Entrypoint, entry, and entry name all come up a lot during your integration journey. An entrypoint is a Payabli-generated alias that identifies a paypoint or organization. When you make an API call, we use the entry value to identify the paypoint or organization the request should belong to, and almost every request includes an entrypoint value.

You can learn more about entrypoints and learn how to find them with the API and in PartnerHub in Entrypoint Overview.

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Boarding

There are a few boarding terms you’ll encounter during your integration.

  • Boarding: the process of enabling a merchant to make and accept payments with Payabli. At the end of a successful boarding process, the merchant becomes a paypoint.
  • Boarding template: the basic template for the form that your merchants use to apply to become a paypoint.
  • Boarding link: a link that includes a form, based off a boarding template, that you send to a merchant to have them apply.
  • Boarding application: a boarding link that has been filled out and submitted to Payabli for underwriting. This is the item that passes through the approval process.
  • Underwriting: Payabli underwrites, or vets, each merchant to make sure that they should be able to process payments with us.

Start

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Send boarding link

Send merchants a boarding link that’s created using your boarding template.

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Merchant applies

The merchant fills out and submits the application, and e-signs the agreement.

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Underwriting

Payabli reviews and decides on the application.

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Paypoint created

If the merchant’s application is approved, the Payabli team converts them to a paypoint.

Learn more about the process in Board Merchants.

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Tokens and test accounts

This section covers where you do all your testing, what you need to know about API tokens, and where you can find test data.

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Environments

During your integration kickoff, you receive access to a sandbox environment. This is where you do all your integration work and testing before you take your integration live and get access to a production environment. Learn more about Environments.

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API tokens

You use API tokens to authenticate with the API. There are several different kinds of tokens, but the kind you will be working with the most is called an organization token. You’ll get your sandbox token during your integration kickoff, but you can also manage tokens in PartnerHub on the Developers page.

Some endpoints require an application token, which you can get from our Support team if needed. Endpoints that require application tokens are noted in the API reference. Learn more about API Tokens.

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Test cards and accounts

Payabli provides card and account numbers to run test transactions. See the full list in Payment Methods for Testing.

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Test paypoints

The Payabli team sets up your first paypoint in the sandbox. When you’re ready to test merchant boarding flows, you need to let us know so we can move your boarding application through a mock underwriting process in sandbox. When we approve your test boarding application, it creates a new paypoint.

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