How to Leverage Metadata to Append Key Information About a Payment

Within our Payment API we support the association of data to a payment record. This elegant approach to handling key business data allows you to streamline your business and create fields that append key information to a payment ranging from product info, customer info, key dates or shipping and tax (or more!).

Using this data to handle shipping and tax records is one great use case. As you expand your business and sell in more locations, you are constantly faced with how to handle VAT/Tax and shipping details. The metadata functionality allows you to attach this extra information as part of the transaction.

By using the metadata functionality with our Payment API, you can directly attach key-value pairs to your orders and the details of the metadata will be associated with the <transaction-id>. Our Payment API is straightforward and the code sample below would simply be included as part of the transaction request:

While the example above references tax and shipping data, metadata can be used to include any data relevant to the order. You can have up to 20 keys, with key names up to 40 characters long and values up to 500 characters long providing excellent flexibility to use the metadata fields as you see fit. With the metadata you can store the different fields in your own local database using a reference to the <transaction-id>.

By using metadata, you can store the info that is most useful for your business and build the reporting needed. We would love to hear ideas from you on how appending data to the payment can create business value.

For additional details on using metadata with our Payment API please check out our documentation.