Virtual Terminal
April’s Virtual Terminal offers flexible options for merchants to conduct their transactions, for example over the phone or without a point of sales (POS). Orders are created by the merchant through the April merchant dashboard and completed either by sending a link to the customer’s device or by having their details entered by the merchant on their behalf.
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The Virtual Terminal is a built-in feature of the merchant dashboard and can be easily accessed without the need for further integration. Simply find the Virtual Terminal option in the dashboard sidebar, create a new order and complete the required fields.
Process
- The merchant opens the Virtual Terminal through their merchant dashboard and creates a new order.
- The merchant enters the details of the order, including the customer’s mobile phone number and email address.
- At this point, the merchant can elect to send a payment link for the customer to complete, or process the order themselves by filling in the payment details on the customer’s behalf.
- The remainder of the transaction is completed in the typical April process, with an option to pay now or in instalments.
Customers given the option to pay in instalments from the Virtual Terminal will still be subject to a KYC check, however they can be pre-registered to streamline their experience at the time of the purchase and any subsequent purchases made through April.
Workflow for this process is separated into activation flow and payment flow to allow the pre-registration of customers via QR code and minimise time completing a purchase.
Using the Virtual Terminal through an in-store POS
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This is an optional step for merchants who have integrated April using direct API integration and wish to use the Virtual Terminal through a POS.
The Virtual Terminal does not require this step to function from the merchant dashboard.
Merchants wishing to utilise the Virtual Terminal and its instalments payments options within their in-store sales flow can integrate it into their POS. This requires the POS to use April’s backend API to create and send an order to a user, and then poll to detect when a payment has completed. There is a timeout option to cancel an order after a predefined poll period.
Step 1 - Creating an order
Set your POS system to create an order in the April API through a call in the backend server using your secret API key
to the Create Order with the CreatePayByLinkOrder action.
This order contains the customer's mobile number and email address, in addition to the price and line items information.
Step 2 - Sending the payment link
April will send the invoice and payment options to the customer’s device using the information in the order.
Step 3 - Retrieving payment information
Set your POS system to poll the April order status API using Get Order, waiting on payment confirmation or failure. It is recommended the poll method have a reasonable timeout period after which the POS system terminates the polling request and cancels the order via a Cancel Order API call.
The Virtual Terminal is now ready to be used through the merchant’s POS. As usual, you may wish to test the functionality before using it with real customers.
What's next?
Visit the testing documentation page to confirm the integration is fully functional.