Order and Transaction Concepts
The following concepts of order and transaction help you to understand the general process of managing payments for online services:
- An order is one instance of a sale between you and your payer. It represents the classical paper 'order' concept, where you sell a bill of goods to your customers. It contains all the classical order data, which includes:
- The line items for the goods that were bought.
- The payer billing details
- The used payment method
- Where the goods are to be shipped
- The amount paid
- A transaction is a specific action made on an order. It may be authenticating the payer or card or reserving or moving money between yourself and the payer.
An operation within an API is the action of sending a request and receiving a response. In the context of the Mastercard Gateway APIs, each transaction operation either creates a transaction on an order, retrieves existing order or transaction information or a gift card or reward balance enquiry.
For more details about orders and transactions, see Orders and Transactions.
For a quick introduction to identifiers used to track orders and transactions in various systems, see Identifiers.
If you have no experience with payment processes and want to understand the basic actors and flows used when working with the Mastercard Gateway, see Payment Actors and Flow.
Series of payments
A cardholder, generally for a one-off payment, or a merchant initiates the payment. A series of payments consists of merchant-initiated payments, where:
- The first payment is a cardholder-initiated payment. The cardholder gives the merchant permission to store their payment details and to make subsequent payments. The storage of the payment details is handled following Credential on File (COF) requirements.
- Subsequent payments are merchant-initiated payments. These payments use the stored payment details and the cardholder agreement to determine when and what kind of payments you can make.
For more information, see Cardholder-initiated and Merchant-initiated Payments.