Converge General Quickstart

Hosted Payment Page Developer Guide

This guide is going to take you through the individual steps you'll need to take to start transacting with Converge.

First off, you'll need a Converge account and the following pieces of information:

  • Merchant Alias
  • Public Key
  • Secret Key

These are provided by your account representative at onboarding. If you don't have these pieces of information or have lost them, you will need to contact support.

Be careful where you put your Secret Key. Do not under any circumstances include it as part of customer-facing code or upload it to a version control repository that is not private and tightly controlled. If you lose control of your Secret Key, contact support.

Your First Request

Let's start off by sending a simple request to Converge to make sure that everything is working correctly.

We're going to send one to the /orders endpoint because it is simple. The /orders endpoint doesn't expect much info and will respond with a list of Orders objects that exist on your account currently. For more information, see the Orders resource.

Authentication

Converge uses a basic authentication model that you can find by concatenating together your Merchant Alias and Secret Key and encoding it in Base 64.

You can make this request with any HTTP client. We're going to use cURL for our examples because it's everywhere and works for almost everyone, but feel free to use another one if you have it.

 

curl -X GET \ 
https://uat.api.converge.eu.elavonaws.com/orders \
 -H 'Accept: application/json;charset=UTF-8' \
 -H 'Accept-Version: 1' \
 -H 'Authorization: Basic {{Your Authentication Key}}' \
 -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
 -H 'cache-control: no-cache'

 

If everything works correctly, you should get a response from the gateway that looks something like the following JSON.

{
   "href": "https://api.eu.convergepay.com/orders/6xxFwvM8BqmM6T6DcF3DyTB3",
   "first": "https://api.eu.convergepay.com/orders?limit=10",
   "next": "https://api.eu.convergepay.com/orders?pageToken=MCwz&limit=10",
   "pageToken": "string",
   "nextPageToken": "MCwz",
   "limit": 10,
   "size": 10,
   "items": [ { ... } ] 
}

Even if your response doesn't have any actual order objects in it, as long as you receive a status code of 200, everything is fine.

Next Steps

With all that out of the way, you're ready to start the real work of integrating with Converge.

Pick an Integration Method

Integration options let you decide the overall approach you would like your site to take to communicate. The approach you pick can affect how much data you collect and how you retain it. This starts to have implications for PCI compliance and GDPR regulations, which go well outside the scope of a quickstart guide. For more information on each option, read through the Integration Guides for each.

  • Hosted Payments Page - This is great if you want a quick and easy integration.
  • Shopping Cart Plugins - These work well if you have a content management system that works with one of the available plugins or if you would like to use an e-commerce framework like Magento on your website.
  • eCommerce API Integration - This gives you full control over what data is retained, what is passed between servers, and how your transactions appear in Converge.

Understand the API

Each of the Integration Methods uses the REST API. Refer to the API Reference to learn more about each of the endpoints, methods, and objects available to work with.