Comment by tgflynn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgflynn | Hacker News Reader

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I just looked at the balanced tutorials here:

https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/overview.html?lang...

and while the code for "Collecting Credit Card Information" makes a lot of sense I find the steps under "Charge a credit card" unclear. Why does one need to create a customer to charge a card that has been tokenized ? I would also suggest making it more clear in this tutorial what the different numbers mean. For example where did CUXj7DWHSxlMvGDLGSYRI3o come from in step 2 ? As for the card_uri I'm guessing that is the uri that was obtained in the prior tutorial, but guessing makes me a little uncomfortable so it would be nice if that were made more explicit.

I'm also wondering why the balancedpayments documentation emphasizes marketplaces over simple e-commerce sites. Does this mean that balanced is a less appropriate solution for simpler sites (ie. where payments are made directly from a site's users to the site itself) ?

Hi there!

Balanced employee here.

You're right. That tutorial could be made much more clear. In fact, this guide and others are being extensively rewritten. The example itself is specific to charging a Card. Therefore, the guide assumes you have an existing Customer since Customer creation is a separate topic. You are correct that the card_uri is an example of one that would be obtained from the previous example. Let me clear up how to charge a credit card.

First, the card needs to be tokenized (information sent to Balanced and securely vaulted), https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/api.html?language=....

Next, either find an existing Customer or create a new one, https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/api.html?language=....

Now add the Card to the Customer, https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/api.html?language=....

Lastly, go ahead and create a new debit, https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/api.html?language=....

A requirement of the current API is that a Card or BankAccount must first be associated to a Customer before it can be used. This is mainly due to the fact that v1.0 of the API is very Customer resource centric, something that's changing in the upcoming 1.1 release. A Customer resource will no longer be required to charge Cards.

If you have any other questions feel free to hop in #balanced on freenode IRC. We love questions!

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