Introduction

Alfa is an alternative payment method in Pakistan that offers a convenient way for customers to pay for goods and services. Integrating Alfa with Payrails allows you to provide a fast, easy-to-use payment option for your customers while leveraging our platform to route the payment to any Payment Service Provider (PSP). This guide will explain the process of integrating Alfa into your app or website using Payrails.

Pre-requisites

Before you start accepting Alfa payments with Payrails, there are a few requirements you must meet:

1. Integrate with Payrails using one of our SDKs or our API
2. Configure a new integration account for Alfa via Thunes.
3. Enable Alfa as a payment option.
4. Make sure you're sending the Alfa specific meta fields (found under Merchant configurations -> Meta fields on your Payrails dashboard and in the examples below) in your requests.

Ways to integrate Alfa

Payrails SDK

The simplest way to use Alfa with Payrails is to use our drop-in in your checkout flow. With this integration type, no additional development work is required to accept payments with Alfa.

Server-to-server integration

The simplest way to use Alfa is by completely managing your own client-side implementation, and using Payrails APIs with a server-to-server integration to process payments with Alfa. With this approach, follow the documentation below to build Alfa into your applications:

Parse Alfa from lookup response

With a server-to-server integration, you can call our lookup payment options endpoint to get available payment options and relevant configurations for each payment method. As the example below, you can see alfa returned as an option of the paymentCompositionOptions. You can use this value later to authorize payments with Payrails as you can see in the next sections.

{
    "name": "lookup",
    "actionId": "0bb6413e-cabb-4074-99e6-9e815c69f25b",
    "executedAt": "2024-05-08T12:33:21.527395295Z",
    "data": {
        "paymentCompositionOptions": [
            {
                "integrationType": "api",
                "paymentMethodCode": "alfa",
                "description": "Alfa"
            }
        ]
    },
    "links": {
        "execution": "http://payrails-api.staging.payrails.io/merchant/workflows/payment-acceptance/executions/83c534ac-13b7-43e6-b04b-f3e8b4eb4424",
        "authorize": {
            "method": "POST",
            "href": "http://payrails-api.staging.payrails.io/merchant/workflows/payment-acceptance/executions/83c534ac-13b7-43e6-b04b-f3e8b4eb4424/authorize"
        }
    }
}

Pass Alfa payment method in request to authorize payment with Payrails

You can then make a request to our authorize a payment endpoint with alfa as the paymentMethodCode. See an example below:

{
  "executionId": "c0fd1c51-e709-47e5-bfd1-5d1c98f7d990",
  "amount": {
    "value": "1000",
    "currency": "PKR"
  },
  "paymentComposition": [{
    "integrationType": "api",
    "paymentMethodCode": "alfa",
    "amount": {
      "value": "1000",
      "currency": "PKR"
    }
  }],
  "meta": {
    "order": {
      "lines": [{
        "id": "UUID",
        "name": "Order Name",
        "quantity": 1,
        "unitPrice": {
          "currency": "PKR",
          "value": "1000"
        }
      }]
    }
  },
  "returnInfo": {
    "success": "https://mysuccessurl.com",
    "error": "https://myerrorurl.com"
  }
}

Supported regions / countries

Supported workflows and services