Merchants are (as reasonably expected) focussed on when they receive their money. FlipPay advises this via status notifications generated by both payment requests and transactions, depending on the payment option selected by the Customer and how the Introducer or Merchant wants to consume the notifications.
When a payment request is sent with a pay later option enabled, and the customer is successful in their application for the pay later option, the payment request will show statuses and generate notifications for each status change, per below.
- “pending”: Payment request is created and available for a Customer to access it, it’s waiting for the Customer to select an option and proceed. Payment requests stay in “pending” until they expire, or are cancelled, or are activated. Most payment requests are created in this status.
- “info-required”: Rarely used or observed and similar to “pending”, payment requests are created in this status via API only, if the pay later product enabled contains a required product field of “file-upload” and the calling system has not yet uploaded the file. While in this status, the payment request is not accessible to a Customer. Typically this status would be applied for a few seconds between the initial API request and the subsequent file upload request. If the file upload fails and is not rectified, the payment request will remain in this status until it expires or is cancelled.
- “expired”: All payment requests expire within 30 days, or a lesser value configured by a Merchant or calling system. When a payment request expires, it is no longer accessible by Customers. Expired payment requests can be resent, or simply ignored.
- “resent”: When an expired payment request is “resent”, Customers can access the original URL again and proceed with a payment option. Resent payment requests can again expire (repeating the loop), or be cancelled by the Merchant, or successfully accessed and activated by a Customer.
- “cancelled”: Merchants can cancel payment requests that have not yet been activated by Customers. Cancelled payment requests cannot be resent as expired payment requests can.
- “active”: When a pay later option is successfully activated on a payment request and until the last payment is received to close the account, the payment request will show as “active”.
- “extended”: Only applicable for “buy now pay once” product types (e.g. VPA), when a Customer successfully applies for an extension their payment request, this status will be shown. If multiple extensions are possible, each successful extension will generate a similar notification, however the status will remain the same. Similarly to “active”, the payment request will remain in this status until the last payment is received to close the account.
- "complete": When the last payment requires to complete a pay later agreement has been received by FlipPay, and the Customer's obligation to FlipPay is complete.
Practical use cases & interpretations
The following scenarios all assume a payment request enabled with a pay later option, and the Customer has successfully applied for that option.
- When a payment request moves to "active", FlipPay will pay the Merchant the requested amount (minus fees)
- When a payment request moves to "extended", the due date on the payment request has been changed - consider updating related business processes or reports that are required to reflect an accurate due date. Remember that if multiple extensions are possible, notifications will be sent for each successful extension.
- When a payment request notifies "info-required" and doesn't notify "pending" shortly afterwards, the required file upload has not completed successfully and should be investigated.
- If a payment request has been successfully created into "pending" status, but changes to it's settings are required, "cancel" the payment request and create a new one. Payment requests are not able to be changed once they are activated or expired or cancelled. While in "pending" or "resent" or "info required, payment requests can have files uploaded/deleted. The only exception to these limitations is for specific product fields to be configured to allow updates while a payment request is "active" or "extended".