Transactions
Transactions are actions that are made on the order. They might be authenticating the payer or card, reserving payer funds, or moving money between you and the payer. You initiate a transaction in your system by sending an API request to the Mastercard Gateway, which in turn processes the request and sends it forward to a relevant payment method provider or acquirer.
To perform any API operation, such as initiate a transaction, you must have the required privilege set on your merchant profile with the gateway. To check which transactions you can initiate, contact your payment service provider. Non-card payments or debit networks may have a limited set of API operations when compared credit cards.
The following sections describe the use cases for individual card transactions. They include simple request examples with the mandatory fields only, using a credit card payment method with stored credit card details provided as a token. For more request and response examples, see the Postman collection.
Initial, standalone, and subsequent transactions
The transactions supported in the Mastercard Gateway are divided into four groups, based on how they can be used.
- Initial
The initial transactions create a new order and start the payment flow for the sale instance. These transactions need a unique order ID that defines the new order. The following transaction types can be used as initial transactions:
- Standalone
The standalone transactions are a special type of initial transaction, used in a situation where the initial transaction for an order is performed outside the gateway or you simply do not want to associate the transaction with an existing order. These transactions are also known in the industry as unreferenced, unmatched, or unlinked transactions and are not enabled by default due to risk of fraud.
The following transaction types can be used as standalone transactions:
- Subsequent
The subsequent transactions are related to an existing order, as they modify or progress that order in some way. These transactions must link to an initial transaction using its order ID.
The following transaction types can be used as subsequent transactions:
- Informational
To provide additional information regarding the order, the payment processor or acquirer creates the informational transactions.
For more information about Authorize, see Authorize.