Card data never touches your servers on any of the routes below. That is a deliberate design choice: it protects your customers and it keeps your PCI obligations to the smallest questionnaire.
Four ways to connect
Pick the least work that does the job. Most businesses should start with a plugin or the hosted checkout and only move to the API when they genuinely need to.
| Route | Effort | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| Payment links | Minutes, no code | You invoice by email, sell occasionally, or take deposits over the phone. |
| Platform plugin | An afternoon | You run a standard storefront and want checkout working without a developer. |
| Hosted checkout | A day | You have a custom site but do not want to handle card fields yourself. |
| Direct API | A sprint | You need full control of the flow, or you are building a marketplace or subscription product. |
The plugin is not the lesser option
A maintained plugin gets scheme changes, new wallets and security updates applied for you. A bespoke integration is yours to maintain forever. Choose the API because you need it, not because it sounds more serious.
Platform plugins
Maintained integrations for the major commerce platforms. Install, paste your keys, take a test payment, go live.
- Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and PrestaShop.
- Cards, wallets and bank transfer appear in checkout automatically, with no per-method work.
- Refunds and partial refunds are issued from inside your store admin, not a separate portal.
- Orders reconcile against settlement using the order reference you already use.
Hosted checkout and the API
- Hosted checkout
- A checkout page that carries your branding and your domain, but is served and secured by us. You send an amount and a reference; we handle card fields, wallets, and strong customer authentication.
- Direct API
- Create payment intents, confirm them, capture later, refund, and subscribe to events. Idempotency keys on every write, so a retried request cannot charge twice.
- Webhooks
- Signed notifications on authorisation, capture, failure, refund and dispute. Verify the signature and never trust an unsigned callback.
- Sandbox
- A full test environment with test cards for success, decline, authentication challenge and dispute, so you can prove the unhappy paths before launch.
- Vaulted cards
- Store a customer card against a token for repeat and one-click purchases. You hold the token; we hold the card.
Test the failure cases
Most launch incidents are not a failed payment; they are a successful payment the site never recorded because the webhook was not handled. Build against the sandbox until a dropped webhook is harmless.
Authentication and conversion
- Strong customer authentication is applied where the scheme rules require it, and skipped where a valid exemption applies.
- Exemptions are requested automatically on low-value and low-risk transactions, which is where most avoidable friction lives.
- Wallet payments authenticate on the device, so they convert better than a card form on almost every site.
- Declines return a reason code, and the dashboard groups them so you can see whether a drop is your checkout or the issuers.
Getting live
- 1Open a business account and complete merchant onboarding.
- 2Generate sandbox keys and build against the test cards, including the decline and dispute cases.
- 3Verify webhook signatures and make your handler safe to run twice on the same event.
- 4Switch to live keys and take one real payment yourself, then refund it.
- 5Watch the decline report for the first week; that is where a bad integration shows up.
Documents you may also need
Merchant Pricing & Fees
What accepting payments costs: transaction rates, settlement options, hardware, chargebacks and the fees other providers leave until the contract.
Merchant ServicesRisk, Fraud & Chargebacks
How transactions are screened, what a chargeback actually is, how to defend one, and the handful of habits that prevent most of them.
Merchant ServicesPayment Terminals
Card machines for the counter, the table and the road: what each one does, what it costs, and how quickly it arrives.
This document was last updated on 1 August 2026. We publish the current version here at all times; superseded versions are available on request.
If anything on this page is unclear, write to us and we will explain it.