Online Payments Quickstart

Online payments are an integral part of SumUp product portfolio. At SumUp, accepting online payments is possible through a number of different approaches, to cater every merchants’ use case. You can either use one of our out-of-the-box integrations, or build a complete and custom payments flow yourself using our APIs. Your app can communicate with SumUp via HTTP requests, all defined in our API Reference.

Image showing integrations in SumUp

To get started, we will walk you through the options SumUp offers for managing online payments.

Getting a test account

To start testing SumUp APIs and tools without involving real money, you need to have a test account. You can create a test account from your account in the Dashboard as shown below.

Log in to your SumUp account.
Open the drop-down menu between Support and your user panel.
Select Test Account. Your merchant account is now switched to test mode.

A screenshot of the account selection dropdown in the SumUp dashboard with the test account highlighted with red circle

Once you have your test account you can begin making API calls with real data. Our test accounts do not process transactions with real funds. Test account has a different ID, and shows a clear warning. When you try to process a request with the value of 11 (in any currency), the test account will always fail - this is by design, to enable testing failed transactions.

A screenshot of the dashboard with test account selected

When you’re done experimenting with the test account, switch back to a regular account for business purposes.

Authorization

All Online Payment products consume SumUp APIs, which requires a means of authorization - either an API Key or Access Token. Check the Authorization Guide for details on the available authorization options in SumUp.

Checkout Products

SumUp provides a range of checkout products for seamless integration with your website.

For a quick and seamless integration, we’ve developed a sleek payment widget. Incorporating the SumUp Card Widget only requires adding a single script to your payment page!

Alternative Payment Methods

The Card Widget supports Alternative Payment Methods (APMs), which enable you to accept payments other than traditional card schemes (Visa or Mastercard). APMs can be accessed through the SumUp Card Widget. Request access by contacting us via our contact form.

At SumUp you can make use of the following APMs:

Apple Pay
Bancontact
Blik
Boleto
EPS
Google Pay
iDeal
MyBank
PIX
Przelewy24
Satispay

SumUp Hosted Checkout

Hosted Checkout is an integration product that offers a complete checkout flow for payment collection. It aims at being easy to integrate and requires little to no code. The solution offers a summary of the checkout details and provides a complete flow for handling payment collection, covering the possible outcomes of payment attempts all the way to the success page.

See Hosted Checkout Documentation for more information.

SumUp Swift Checkout SDK

The Swift Checkout SDK enables you to offer a complete and fast checkout experience to your end users, allowing you to collect payment, address, and contact information with a click of a button.

See Swift Checkout Documentation for more information.

Plugins

If you’re using Prestashop, Wix, or WooCommerce, good news! You can use one of our plugins to seamlessly get paid with SumUp. Please check the Plugins section for details on each plugin.

Custom Integrations

SumUp APIs

SumUp provides REST API for most of its services like creating and executing payments, storing cards for future payments, issuing refunds among others. Our API uses either API Keys or OAuth 2.0 authorization standards to authenticate applications access to its services. We also support Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) allowing web browsers securely to consume our API from a different domain origin.

The API receives requests and communicates responses mostly in JSON format, except for when the request needs to contain form encoded data. Typically, the requests are data objects consisting of name/value pairs sent to the SumUp API URI: api.sumup.com

Receiving payments

In order to receive payments, you need to create a checkout. Whether you would like to receive payments as a merchant directly, or initiate payments on a merchant’s behalf depends on the type of authorization provided. Checkouts are created in a server-to-server communication. This ensures that you can keep your access token and client credentials secret and guarantees that sensitive checkout details, e.g. amount or recipient, cannot be changed.

Completing checkouts could be done via your web browser or mobile application, which guarantees you do not need to worry about sensitive data, like card data, ever hitting your servers and thus avoiding the need to be PCI DSS compliant.

SumUp provides flexibility to complete a checkout by offering a couple of integration approaches:

You could build a custom card form that you must submit to the SumUp servers for processing
You could use the SumUp Card Widget
You could process payments with Alternative Payment Methods, like Boleto, Bancontact & iDeal
You could process recurring payments

Once you complete the checkout, you would have processed a payment successfully to a merchant’s SumUp account.