Best API to accept payments

Written by

James Davis

Written by James Davis

Senior Technical Writer at United Thinkers

Author of the Paylosophy blog, a veteran writer, and a stock analyst with extensive knowledge and experience in the financial services industry that allows me to cover the latest payment industry news, developments, and insights. Read more

Reviewed by

Kathrine Pensatori

Reviewed by Kathrine Pensatori

Product Specialist at United Thinkers

Product specialist with more than 10 years of experience in the Payment Processing Industry. I help payment facilitators and PSPs solve their various payment processing issues. Read more

Looking for information on how to design a good API to accept payments? Many of the considerations are the same as building an API. You must build upon sensible verbs, abstractions and data structures that are easy to understand and composable.

An application program interface (API) is a set of instructions — including tools, protocols, and routines — for building a software application. The API determines how the software pieces interact.

Best API for payments

But what does your company need to know to design a good payments API?

Consider these three things:

• You don’t get to define the world. When designing a payment API, many of the fundamental objects like credit cards and ACH debits as well as operations like authorizations and refunds matter. Your programming team has to work with all these objects to determine for themselves whether reasoning happens at the server, application or cluster level, for example.
• There’s a lot you don’t have to do. There’s a lot of legacy code out there, but you don’t have to follow rules of the past. Since you’re in a position to think things through from the beginning, you can figure out what processes to throw away – and what’s essential.
• Users will know right away if you do a good job. Users know what they need from a payments API, and it’s hard to implement something without someone noticing almost immediately. After all, you’re working with money, and customers at every level will quickly tell you if the fund isn’t moving correctly. You must design the API while not duplicating the mistakes of the past, a tricky balance.

United Thinkers has designed the UniPay payment gateway from the ground up. We threw old assumptions and bad programming out the window to create something new that would work smoothly and play well with others. In fact, the UniPay gateway contains everything many companies need and can be customized to meet the needs of any company.

Wondering how to design a good payments API? The UniPay gateway could be all you need. At United Thinkers, we’re here to help with your payment needs.