Smart Checkout Functionality & Options

An overview of the key functionality & options offered by Smart Checkout.

Styling & design

We would highly recommend you show your company logo on your Smart Checkout payment pages in order to increase customer recognition and trust, thus improving conversion. You can insert your company logo while creating a payment source for Smart Checkout.

You can also change or update this logo at any time, for any given payment source. To do this, please see our adding your brand logo tutorial for a step-by-step guide.

Add your brand color

You can also add your preferred brand color to your Smart Checkout payment pages in the form of a URL parameter. Please see the specify brand color section of our Smart Checkout Integration guide for further information.

Checkout language

The language that Smart Checkout is presented in is determined according to this sequence:

  1. Language specified as a query parameter during the redirect by the merchant
  2. Language selected by the customer during a previous checkout
  3. Language specified during the creation of the payment order by the merchant
  4. Dominant language in the customer country

Save payment cards for future use

Smart Checkout offers customer-side card tokenization. This means that the customer can save their card and reuse it while on Smart Checkout across merchants and countries. Customers can save cards once, and use everywhere.

The merchant is not involved in this process; in fact, you will not even be aware that your customers are using a saved card. In technical terms, this means that you will not receive any card tokens yourself; the card token will remain on the browser of the customer.

Functionality

Saving a card

The customer is able to save their card details during payment, as shown below:

Smart Checkout - saving a card

Paying with a saved card

When paying, the customer is able to select which of their saved cards to use:

Smart Checkout - paying with a saved card

Editing or deleting a saved card

If desired, the customer can click on the edit (pencil) icon to edit or delete a saved card:

Smart Checkout - editing or deleting a saved card

From here, the customer can either:

Smart Checkout - editing a saved card

When attempting to delete a saved card, a prompt will be shown, asking the customer to either cancel or complete the deletion:

Smart Checkout - deleting a saved card

Decline recovery

When a payment is declined, if certain criteria are satisfied, then we prompt the customer to try again with either the same payment method or with a different payment method.

The criteria examined to trigger the decline recovery will be constantly fine-tuned going forward to ensure ever-improving results.

By performing decline recovery, the conversion rate improves, with a significant portion of recovered declines resulting in a successful payment.

This feature is automatically enabled for all merchants, and thus merchants do not need to do anything, on their online store or to their integration with us, to take advantage of this new conversion-improving feature.

Field validation

There are two categories of validation available on Smart Checkout, Inline and On Submit, as described below:

Smart Checkout - field validation

Inline validation

This type of validation occurs instantly as the customer moves between fields, but only if text has been entered.

*Quick Pay only.

On Submit validation

This type of validation occurs once the customer has clicked on the button to make the payment.

Form auto-complete

Smart Checkout allows the customer to auto-complete their card details if this functionality is supported by their browser. In such cases, the customer can select the desired payment card from a dropdown and the form will be completed with the respective card details.

Automatic card logo display

The card logo is displayed once the customer has started entering the card number. For most cards, only two digits are necessary before the card is identified and the card logo is shown. Maestro and Bancontact are exceptions, with three and four digits required respectively before this will occur.

3DS challenge flow

The card issuer may choose to initiate a 3DS (3D Secure) challenge. In such a case, the issuer requires additional customer interaction, either through biometrics, two-factor authentication, or similar methods.

Payment order expiry

If the customer is unable to make a payment because the checkout process has expired, then the customer should go back the merchant store and restart the checkout process. The paymentTimeout parameter can be used to set the expiry time when creating a payment order

Pre-authorizations

Pre-authorization (pre-auth) transactions with a debit card or credit card hold the balance as unavailable either until the merchant ‘captures’ the transaction or the hold ‘falls off’. The latter is automatically done after a certain period, at which point the pre-authorization is ‘lost’ and can no longer be captured.

A pre-authorization is enabled if the following condition is met:

More information on handling pre-authorizations (including creating, capturing and cancelling) can be found on our tutorial page.

Pre-authorizations are not available with recurring payments or card installments

Pay by card installments

The option to pay by card installments is enabled if the following three conditions are met:

Please note: If offering installments, the value provided by the merchant is not the number of installments the customer will select, and it is not mandatory for the customer to select installments at all. The process is as follows:

  1. The merchant indicates the maximum number of installments they wish to offer to the customer
  2. It is then up to the customer whether they pay with or without installments
  3. If the customer decides to pay with installments, they are able to select the number of installments (up to the maximum specified by the merchant)

More information on payment by card installments can be found on our tutorial page.

Card installments are not available with recurring payments or pre-authorizations

Recurring payments

A recurring payment A.K.A. a subscription is initiated by the merchant without the involvement or presence of the customer (no 3DS authentication is required), done on a regular or non-regular schedule, for a fixed or variable amount. This requires an initial payment to be made with the involvement of the customer, during which the customer provides consent to the merchant to make future automatic payments (recurring payments). Recurring payments can be created via API and from within the Viva Wallet account (self-care).

More information on recurring payments/subscriptions can be found on our tutorial page and payment tools page.

Recurring payments are not available with card installments or pre-authorizations

Get Support

If you would like to integrate with Viva Wallet, or if you have any queries about our products and solutions, please see our Contact & Support page to see how we can help!