Overview
Definition
COF purchase is a payment type in which customer authorizes merchant to store customer's payment credentials for subsequent use for one or more later transfers of funds from customer to merchant. In COF purchases, no payment instrument verification (for instance, card CVV entry) is required.
In COF purchases, fund transfers from customer to merchant are called debiting.
Overview
COF purchase support may be useful for building long-term customer loyalty when you need to offer your customers easy and hassle-free checkout.
The payment platform supports the following COF payment types:
- One-click purchase is initiated by customer occasionally without any schedule or amount limitation or terms. For instance, customer can make a one-click purchase of a movie to view it online.
- Autopurchase is initiated by merchant without any schedule or amount limitation or terms. For example, when customer's mobile phone account balance falls below specific threshold, merchant may automatically top up the account.
- Regular purchase is initiated by merchant based on specific schedule and fixed amount. The debiting terms may be stored either on the payment platform or in your web service. For example, weekly online subscription may be regularly debited to customer's account.
In any COF purchase, storage of payment credentials must be authorised by customer; customer is also required to agree to specific credential usage terms.
Any COF purchase needs to be initialised by performing the first debiting or payment instrument authorisation by using the corresponding request with appropriate parameters. For detailed information about the parameters, see Registering COF purchase; the information about processing options, see below.
Processing options
For one-click purchases and autopurchases, the ecommpay platform supports only debiting by request option while for regular purchases two options are available: debiting by request and automatic debiting.
Regardless of processing option, you can perform COF purchases by using either basic scenario or scenario with submission of additional purchase information. The following sections describe the basic scenario: