Platforms quick start

Before you begin

Before you start using Adyen for Platforms, make sure to:

1. Contact our Sales Team to check if your use cases are eligible for Adyen for Platforms.

   When we confirm that Adyen for Platforms is a good fit for your use cases, you receive your Adyen test credentials including two API credentials.

2. Create API keys for your two API credentials.

   • Platform: ws_[123456]@MarketPlace.[YourPlatformAccount].
     You'll use the API key to onboard sub-merchants as account holders and to send payouts.
   • Payments: ws@Company.[YourCompanyAccount].
     You'll use the API key to process payments for your account holders.

Step 1: Sign up sub-merchants

To start with your integration, sign up sub-merchants as account holders in your platform.

For each sub-merchant, create a corresponding account holder, and one or more (if necessary) accounts.

To create an account holder, call /createAccountHolder, specifying:

• firstName
• lastName 
• email
• legalEntity (individual or business)
• country

The fields above are required for an account holder to start accepting payments and initiating the verification process.

The following code illustrates how to create an individual account holder with the basic fields:

When you create an account holder, by default we also create an account for this account holder. If you'd rather create accounts manually using the /createAccount endpoint, include in your /createAccountHolder request:

• createDefaultAccount: false

Step 2: Onboard and verify account holders

During the onboarding process, you need to collect additional information from the account holder for verification checks. The account holder must pass these checks before they can process payments at higher tiers and have payouts enabled.

You can either build your own onboarding implementation or send the account holders to a Hosted Onboarding Page where they can directly submit their information. If you choose to build your own implementation, you'll have to collect the required information and send this information to Adyen using either the /updateAccountHolder or /uploadDocument API calls. 

The account holder might also need to provide additional documents. The code below illustrates how to upload a passport using the /uploadDocument call. The image file, which contains the document, must be encoded as a Base64 string and assigned to the documentContent field, and the documentDetail object should contain an account holder code and other information about the document.

Step 3: Process payments

After creating account holders with the basic information, you can immediately start processing payments for them. In this case, the amount customers pay to your platform should be split between an account holder's account and your platform's account. 

To make a payment, you'll need to send a /payments request and provide the API key for your ws@Company.[YourCompanyAccount] API credential.

In your request, pass split-specific fields. In the example below, paymentMethod and amount fields contain payment details, while split contains instructions on how to split a payment. In this case, EUR 62.00 will be split between an account holder's account (EUR 60.00) and your platform commission (EUR 2.00).

Step 4: Pay out

After an account holder successfully passes required verification checks, you can initiate a payout to either their bank account or to a card eligible for payouts.

For this, call /payoutAccountHolder as follows. In the example below, currency and value specify the amount to be paid out (EUR 997.92), accountCode and accountHolderCode uniquely identify the source account, while the bankAccountUUID specifies the bank account that receives the payout.

Step 5: Set up notifications

All Platforms API create, update, and delete requests are asynchronous, so you must rely on notifications to know the final result of a request. To be aware of all the events that happen to your platform account, as well as get the results of verification and other important changes, your system must be able to accept notifications.

You receive these notifications as callbacks to the URLs you specify via the /createNotificationConfiguration call. In this case, we activate the ACCOUNT_HOLDER_VERIFICATION notification that should be sent to the endpoint on your server (https://www.merchant-domain.com/notification-handler) using the specified connection credentials (testUserName and testPassword).

For more information, refer to Configure notifications and Notification types. You may also want to configure HMAC signing of notifications for additional verification. To do this, see Signing notifications with HMAC.

Step 6: Reconcile transactions using reports

After you have made transactions in the test environment, check the generated reports so you can start building your reconciliation process.

For more information on how most Adyen for Platforms merchants use the reports, refer to Reconcile transactions using reports.