Business Messages - Payments Take Blip May 28, 2021 20:31 Updated How to set up payments in GBM The GBM channel doesn’t have an integrated component for receiving payments. In order to do so there are a few options available and they all involve a similar process which isn’t exclusive to GBM and can be applied to any channel. During the conversational flow of the chatbot, after your customer has chosen which products to buy, you’ll need to create a checkout link which will redirect your customer to a webpage. This means that the payment process is carried out outside of the channel, which is why this can be applied to any channel, and not only GBM. Since the process is unrelated to any messaging channel, there are many ways to do it. There is one example made on the business messages repository on github of a store that sells items to their customers through a chatbot on the Google Business Messages platform and their process is very much the same as we explained before: the payment is carried out outside of the GBM channel, through a website. The main point to take away from this example is that they utilize the Stripe payment integration API in order to carry out the payment. Stripe Stripe is a payment provider with a well-documented RESTful API which makes it easy to create a fully integrated payment checkout page. The following are a few of Stripe’s docs if you wish to dive deeper: The documentation for the Stripe API. How to get up and running with Stripe. This link provides an overview of Stripe’s libraries and the first setup. A working prebuilt checkout page as an example of what a working web page integrated with Stripe looks like. However, Stripe is only one payment provider, there are many others that can be chosen, as such, another option for receiving payments is utilizing the Google Pay API. Google Pay API The difference between using Google Pay API or something like Stripe is that Google Pay isn’t a payment provider like Stripe, which means when you configure your Google Pay API you need to choose from a list of payment providers around the world. This is a lot better from a flexibility standpoint since you’ll be able to choose the payment provider that best suits your needs. However, even when choosing the Google Pay API, the process will still be the same, the user will need to be redirected from the channel to a webpage. In Google API’s case, they’ll be redirected to a webpage with a Google Pay payment button which will prompt the user to select their payment method, then a payment token will be sent to the backend of that website, from there, the backend will need to send this payment token to the payment service provider. The documentation for the Google Pay API. An Overview of the Google Pay API including a step-by-step guide on how to begin integrating it with your web page, and configuring it to accept payment cards.
