Introduction
What the Alphabet Payment Bridge is, and how test and live keys work.
The Alphabet Payment Bridge is one payment API for Alphabet's applications and for Alphabet's clients. Your application creates a payment, sends the customer to a hosted checkout page, and learns the result through the API and signed webhooks. The bridge talks to each payment provider behind the scenes.
APS (card payments in Iraq) is the first provider. More gateways, wallets and installment providers will be added later behind the same API, so an application that integrates once does not need to integrate again when a new provider arrives.
What you build
Your side of the integration is small:
- Your server creates a payment with
POST /api/v1/paymentsand gets acheckout_url. - You redirect the customer to that URL. The bridge shows your application's name and logo, the amount and the order reference, then sends the customer to the provider's card page.
- The customer comes back to your
return_url. - Your server confirms the result, either from a webhook or by fetching the payment. Never trust the redirect alone.
Payment flow walks through it step by step.
Test keys and live keys
Every application has two kinds of API key:
| Key | Starts with | Where payments go | Real money |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test | pk_test_ |
A built-in simulator of the provider | No |
| Live | pk_live_ |
The real provider account linked to your application | Yes |
The key alone decides the mode. A test key never reaches a real gateway, whichever provider account your application is linked to, so you can build and test your whole integration without real money. In test mode you choose the outcome yourself: paid, declined, cancelled or expired, and you can refund through the API. See Test mode.
Test and live payments are kept apart: a test key cannot see live payments and a live key cannot
see test payments. Every payment and webhook carries its mode.
Amounts
Amounts are whole Iraqi dinars (IQD) as integers: 25000 is 25,000 IQD. There are no decimals
and no fractions. Every payment also carries a currency field, which is always IQD today.
Where to go next
- Quickstart: your first test payment in five minutes with curl.
- Authentication: how to send your key, and how to roll it.
- Payments: every field of the payments API.
- Webhooks: events, signatures and retries.