We have outlined below the steps involved in integrating a website with PesaPal. To view samples and the complete API reference, please click here.
Build your site that will accept payments or donations from your customers.
The site will:
Please Note: the information you collect will be dependent on your site requirements. But some information is required by PesaPal
Package the request to post to PesaPal and sign it
Once you have the customer and payment details, you need to package it to send to PesaPal.
This involves a few steps as we need to ensure that the communication between your site and PesaPal happens in a secure manner.
PesaPal uses OAuth to make sure that no one else interfers with the request you post to PesaPal
Post the request to PesaPal and load the PesaPal payments page
When a request is posted, PesaPal will display a payments page. This is where the customer will make the payment.
You can embed this payments page directly in your site, providing a seamless experience to your customers. You can do this by inserting an IFrame on the page on your site customers land on when they click pay or checkout.
Display a post-payment page to your customer
Once the customer has completed the payment proces on PesaPal, they will be redirected to a page on your site.
You can use this page to inform the customer that their payment is being processed.
Optionally, you can also query PesaPal at this point to see if the payment has completed succesfully, has failed, or is still being processed.
Add URL to listen to Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) from PesaPal
Log in to your PesaPal account and go to the "IPN Settings" menu option.
Enter the domain of your website which you have integrated with PesaPal.
Enter the URL (belonging to this domain) at which you will listen to notifications from PesaPal every time a state change has occurred on one of your transactions. For example, when a transaction goes from PENDING to COMPLETED.
Query PesaPal for payment status
One last step! When you receive an IPN notification from PesaPal, you need to query PesaPal for the payment status using the pesapal_transaction_tracking_id and pesapal_merchant_reference that was sent with the notification
A PENDING status indicates that the payment is being processed by PesaPal and the final status of payment (COMPLETED or FAILED) is not yet known.
