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.

To process any COF purchase, regardless of its type, you need to collect the customer's consent to subsequent storing and use of their payment details according to specific terms and conditions (that conform to the requirements of global card networks ). As a rule, collecting such consent is carried out when the COF purchase is registered.

Processing options

Any COF purchase needs to be registered. You can do it in a variety of ways: for example, by performing a one-step purchase or payment instrument verification with the use of the corresponding request with appropriate parameters (details). In addition, COF purchases can be registered elsewhere and subsequently migrated to the ecommpay payment platform from an external acquirer (details) or even performed without migrating their data to the platform.

Information about COF purchases already registered can be stored in the ecommpay platform or elsewhere (in the merchant's web service or on the side of the external acquirer). Note that within one project only one way to store data can be configured. Thus, if for a specific project, you have already set up processing COF purchases with the payment details stored outside of the ecommpay platform, then processing COF purchases with the payment details stored in the platform will not be allowed, and vice versa.

COF purchases can be processed as follows.

There are two processing options available for regular COF purchases with registration data stored in the ecommpay platform:

• with automatic debiting when each debit operation is initiated in the platform according to a previously configured schedule.
• with on-demand debiting when each debit operation is initiated by the merchant.

Other types of COF purchases (i.e. they are not regular COF purchases or information about them is not stored in the platform) can only be processed using the on-demand debiting option.

In addition, regardless of the selected processing option, COF purchases can be performed according to the standard workflow or with the auxiliary procedure of submitting additional payment information.