Integration checklist

Learn about the steps required to build a partner integration with Adyen.

Follow the scoping checklist below to decide on the functionalities and features you will offer to your customers. After you have scoped your integration, start building an ecommerce, or point-of-sale integration with Adyen.

When building a partner integration, consider the ease of integration and implement all the features we offer that can be useful for your customers to offer the best integration and shopping experiences to their shoppers.

Building a partner integration with Adyen consists of the following steps:

Scope the configuration and maintenance flows for your integration.
Explore the payment methods that you can offer to your customers.
Determine the account structure you need to meet your use case. For example, an in-person payments integration with multiple physical stores require a different account setup than an online payments integration for an ecommerce store.
Review the integration requirements to learn about the payment flows and features that are required to build a minimum viable partner integration with Adyen.
Explore the features we offer to customize your integration according to your needs, and enable unique experiences for your shoppers.
Choose the integration architecture that you will use to build your integration.
After you have scoped all the features and payment methods you will enable for your customers, and decided on an integration architecture, build your integration.
Document your integration to make your integration accessible and easy to integrate with for your customers.
Prepare to go live with your integration.

Scope the configuration and maintenance flows for your integration

To onboard customers to your integration scalably and offer a seamless configuration experience, you can integrate with the Management API and OAuth. These additions let your customers integrate faster and more easily with your integration by automating configuration flows.

Management API: reduce manual configuration work for your customers by integrating with our Management API to configure and manage account settings available in the Adyen Customer Area using HTTP calls.

There are additional API credential roles you need to use the Management API.
OAuth: integrate with OAuth to let your customers delegate API access to you, so you can authorize API requests on behalf of your customers.

Explore payment methods

Adyen supports global and local payment methods. Use our payment methods documentation for online payments, and in-person payments to find the payment methods that you need depending on the channels and locations you want to support. Take a look at our payment method guides per region to understand global payment patterns.

Determine Adyen account structures

You can have different account structures with Adyen. We require partner integrations to be able to support multi-store setups, meaning that the integration you build must be able to handle multiple merchant accounts under one company account.

Learn more about account structures for online payments and in-person payments.

Review the integration requirements

As a partner, you are required to integrate with some features that Adyen offers to ensure that your integration can handle most common payment flows and handle happy and unhappy flows. There are different requirements for online payments and in-person payments integrations.

Online payments

Payment modifications: allow your customers to modify a payment's status and support shoppers in different payment scenarios. Modifications include refunds, cancellations, authorization adjustments, and delayed and separate captures. Modifications also allow you to build additional logic, such as enabling a flow where a payment is only captured upon shipment.
3D Secure 2 Authentication: allow customers to authenticate shoppers, where required.
Add application information in your requests: let Adyen identify the payments that are processed through your integration.
Webhooks: inform customers of payment status changes, build logic to update other systems that are integrated with the payments flow.
Response and error handling: when a customer makes a payment request to Adyen, they receive a response from Adyen. Your integration must be able to handle different responses.
- Learn about the HTTP status codes, and build logic to display them to shoppers.
- Learn about error codes and messages.
Result code mapping: learn about the result codes that are returned in Adyen API responses and make sure your integration can handle all results.

Depending on the regions where your customers accept payments, there may be additional payment flows and features that are required to include in your integration, for example to comply with local regulations.

In-person payments

Add application information in your requests: let Adyen identify the payments that are processed through your integration.
E2EE and P2PE PCI security: the payment terminals provided by Adyen use the Adyen End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) solution to protect the whole payments value chain. If desired, you can opt-in to use our Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) solution. This is equally secure as E2EE and has the benefit of being PCI-certified. However, P2PE is only available for a limited set of terminal models.
Refunds: issue refunds for point-of-sale transactions. We offer two types of refunds, referenced, and unreferenced.
Receipts: use the data you get in the API response from Adyen to generate receipts for your shoppers.
In-progress transaction cancellations: support cancelling a transaction while in progress to support situations where a shopper changes their mind, or when your store staff needs to abort the transaction.
Transaction status verification: let your store staff verify the status of a transaction in cases of a communication or technical issue.
Logging: Implement logging for your terminals to help troubleshooting.

Explore additional features

Adyen supports a wide range of features that allows your customers to enable unique shopper experiences.

To find out about all the features that are relevant for the industry and markets you operate in, see Industries and markets. You can use our industry and sales channel selector to get an overview of all features we recommend for you.

After you have decided on the features that you will integrate with, find out how to integrate with them in our documentation:

Choose your integration architecture

Adyen offers different implementation options to build online payments and in-person payments integrations.

Online payments

Choose one of our server-side flows depending on the use cases that you want to support.
You can connect your server-side implementation to our different client-side solutions:

Drop-in: Render a list of available payment methods anywhere on your website, with the option to customize the styling of the payment methods list.
Components: Render individual payment methods anywhere on your website, with the option to customize the styling of each payment method.
Custom UI: Create your own UI and build an API-only integration.

See the Adyen demo store to experience the checkout with our prebuilt UI. Using our Drop-in or Components decreases the integration effort required and ensures that you comply with PCI DSS.

If you want to offer your customers the option to build headless integrations, where they use your integration to process payments in the back end and allow them to use their own UI, you must follow the API-only implementation.

In-person payments

Learn about the integration choices available for in-person payments integrations in our documentation. We offer:

Payment terminals and mobile solutions:
- Various terminals to choose from depending on your needs. The terminals available to you depend on your selected security solution.
- Mobile solutions to accept Tap to Pay or card reader payments using a mobile device like a smartphone, instead of a payment terminal.
Local or cloud communications to connect payment terminals to the Adyen payments platform. Use our questionnaire to figure out which option suits your needs.

Review security and compliance requirements

See our Integration Security Guide to learn about the security measures that you have to implement.
See our PCI DSS compliance guide to learn about your responsibilities to comply with PCI DSS.
To process payments in Europe, you need to comply with PSD2 SCA regulations.

Build your integration

After you have scoped your integration and decided on the features and payment methods you will enable for your customers, start building your integration.

Use our resources that outline the steps required to build an integration with Adyen:

While you are building your integration, we strongly recommend to document the integration journey that you can provide to your customers later. As an Adyen partner, it is your responsibility to provide the documentation for your integration.

Document your integration

While you are building your integration, we recommend to document the integration so that you offer your customers complete and detailed documentation on how to integrate. We recommend to break down the documentation in two parts, to make a clear distinction between the steps your customers have to follow in your ecosystem, and in Adyen's Customer Area.

In your documentation, include:

The features that you support.
The regions that your integration is available in.
Integration guides to configure and enable Adyen features.
Testing documentation to let customers make end-to-end tests before going live with your integration.

Prepare for go-live

Test your integration

Follow our testing guide for online payments, and in-person payments to make sure that your integration can handle different payment scenarios. After you have tested your integration, take your integration live to start onboarding customers to your integration.

After you have tested your integration, you can start onboarding customers to your integration.

Run a pilot

We strongly recommend to run a pilot with at least one customer, before you start onboarding more customers to your integration.

Onboard customers

You are responsible to provide your customers with documentation and other relevant information to integrate with your integration. Before going live, make sure that they test the integration and have completed all the required integration steps.

Your customers must apply for a live account, and submit the Attestation of Compliance (AOC), or the Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ). A contract must be signed between your customers and Adyen before you can process payments with your integration on behalf of them.