Welcome to the ProcessOut documentation! Use the sidebar to the left to browse our user guide and get started with our products.

Introduction

A small but significant portion of an online merchant’s sales are often lost because errors occur during transactions. Also, processing charges for transactions fluctuate and they vary between Payment Service Providers (PSPs) at any given time. This means that a merchant often won’t be getting the cheapest rate available for a transaction.

ProcessOut provides two main products to help merchants avoid losing revenue from these problems:

Telescope: This tool analyzes transaction data to help merchants understand which of their payments typically fail. It gives them personalized advice about how to fix the problems so they can complete similar payments successfully in the future.
Smart Router: This is a payment API for web and mobile apps and servers. You can register several PSPs with Smart Router so that it can choose the best one for a particular transaction. It makes the choice by analyzing each transaction while it is happening and then picking the best PSP based on the results of the analysis. The optimal PSP will be one that is highly likely to complete the payment and is also offering a favorable handling fee. Smart Router can also automatically retry failed transactions or reroute to a different PSP when a persistent error occurs. If you want more manual control, you can configure the routing with rules to choose particular PSPs based on card type, channel (web, iOS, Android, etc), and location, among other options.
Note that you can use Telescope as a standalone product but you must add our API code to your app before you can use Smart Router.

The Smart Router infrastructure provides a vault system to store customers’ card details with PCI DSS Level 1 security. It also lets you use alternative payment methods instead of cards. These include global ones such as PayPal but also highly local ones such as AliPay in China. This gives customers more payment options and increases the chances of a successful sale even further.

Getting an account

Please contact an account manager at [email protected] to get an account. We'll get you sorted in a minute!

First steps with Smart Router

Smart Router needs a selection of several PSPs to be available so that it can choose the best one at any particular time. You can add PSPs from the Dashboard › Payment providers screen.

If you have previously stored customers’ card numbers with a PSP then you can arrange for us to transfer those numbers directly into the Smart Router vault. See the page about migrating to Smart Router for more information.

When you are set up, you will need to integrate Smart Router into your app using our API. You can browse our documentation using the sidebar to the left. See the section about accepting card payments to learn how to add Smart Router’s functionality to your app. See the section about alternative payment methods if you are interested in using PayPal, Klarna, or one of the mobile app payment systems.

SDK

We provide a Javascript version of our client-side SDK for web integration and also iOS and Android versions for mobile apps.

You can call our server-side REST API directly using a tool such as curl but we also provide SDKs for 5 programming languages:

We provide code samples in all 5 languages throughout our documentation.