Introduction to payments

This page gives you an overview of how payments work with Vipps MobilePay and guides you through each step of the general payment flow. Whether you're creating, capturing, cancelling, or refunding a payment, you'll find what you need right here. You'll also find links to important guidelines, error handling, and related topics to help you get up and running smoothly.

Basic flow

The basic online flow is:

Vipps

MobilePay

1. Customer selects to pay with Vipps or MobilePay
2. The merchant creates a payment request
3. The Vipps or MobilePay app will open with the request for payment.
   • If the customer is on a phone with the app installed, they get an automatic switch over to the Vipps/MobilePay app.
   • Otherwise, the Vipps/MobilePay landing page will open and they enter their phone number.
4. Customer confirms the payment in the app
5. The merchant's shop confirms the order
6. The merchant completes the order and shipping
7. The merchant captures the payment

In a physical store, you need to get the customer's phone number before creating the payment request. See recommended flows for several illustrated examples.

A typical payment status follows these steps:

Payment flow

Each of these operations are described in this section.

• Create payment
• Capture
• Cancel
• Refund

The payment states section explains how a payment changes state at each step.

Tracking the status

Track status with both Webhooks and polling, according to our polling guidelines.

Get the payment details with:

• Get payment details
• Get payment event log

Learn about ePayment webhooks.

Error handling

For handling errors from the API, check out:

• Error handling: ePayment API errors
• Error handling: Rate limiting

Payment guidelines

You should capture as soon as is legally possible after a payment is reserved, because some banks will release the funds after some days, making it difficult to capture later. If it's not captured within the payment capture deadlines, it will be automatically cancelled.

However, be aware that it isn't legal to capture before the product or service is provided to the customer, as per the capture regulations.

If you do not plan to capture the entire amount, please make sure to cancel the remainder as soon as possible. Cancelling the remaining reservations will benefit the consumer, freeing up the amount for other purposes.

If you need to communicate some change to the payment after it has been reserved, you will need to send a new API request. You can refund and cancel, as well as other operations.

The Electric vehicle charging flow shows an example of partially capturing the payment and then cancelling the remainder.

Related pages

See the Knowledge base for general information about payments in Vipps MobilePay.

See the many examples of online and in-store flows:

• Online payments
• In-store payments
• In-store using merchant callback QR
• Static QR directing to the app for payment