Overview

Developers have the option to switch away from Cepta checkout. Sometimes you want to build a custom gateway that resonates with your brand in terms of UI or UX. Our Charge API allows you to take control of the payment experience by building a tailored gateway for your business. However, we still process the payment under the hood. This gives you some form of control over how you accept payment rather than using our accept payment method, where we have provided a link for you to complete the payment.

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How it works

To initialize and complete a transaction using our Charge API, we expect that you follow this three steps.

1. Initialize transaction
2. Validate Transaction OTP
3. Confirm Transaction

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Initialize Transaction

The first step is to create and initiate a payment request for your customer. This step typically involves sending a request to our API to initiate the transaction by providing necessary details like the payment amount, currency, customer information, and other relevant data.

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Encrypt card details with AES Encryption

To securely encrypt the card details, the IV (Initialization Vector) and Key must first be converted from Base64 encoding into a raw binary buffer to be used in the AES encryption process. The encryption should be performed using either AES-CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) or the more secure AES-GCM (Galois/Counter Mode).

Before encryption, the card details object must be serialized into a string format using JSON.stringify(). Using the derived Key and IV, the data is then encrypted and the resulting ciphertext is encoded into Base64, making it suitable for transmission. To decrypt the data, the same Key and IV are used to reverse the encryption process, converting the Base64-encoded ciphertext back into its original readable format. This ensures that sensitive information remains protected while being transmitted or stored securely.

See sample code:

const crypto = require("crypto");

const key = Buffer.from("qD0JjHkS4/21ej8wD2xT6Q==", "base64"); // Convert Base64 key
const iv = Buffer.from("h4sR8+RuyyP1+1k2g2+GOQ==", "base64"); // Convert Base64 IV
const data = JSON.stringify({
  cardNumber: "5060666666666666666",
  expiryYear: "26",
  expiryMonth: "02",
  pin: "1111",
  cvv: "111",
});

function encryptAES(data, key, iv) {
  const cipher = crypto.createCipheriv("aes-256-cbc", key, iv);
  let encrypted = cipher.update(data, "utf8", "base64");
  encrypted += cipher.final("base64");
  return encrypted;
}

const encryptedData = encryptAES(data, key, iv);

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Verify Transaction OTP

After the transaction is initialized, the customer will be prompted to verify their payment by entering an OTP (One-Time Password) sent to their registered contact (e.g., phone number or email). This step ensures that the person initiating the transaction is the authorized user.

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Confirm Transaction

Once the OTP is verified, the final step is to confirm the transaction status to know if the payment was successfully completed. To learn more about our transaction status, check here.

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