<aside> ⚠️ This is an early documentation specification of the Open Payment SDK and meant to be used as reference. This feature is not yet published within Spare and final documentation is likely to change on release.

</aside>

Introduction

Currently Spare only supports Stripe as a native payment processor. The Open Payment SDK is designed to solve this problem by allowing 3rd party developers to integrate their own payments apps into Spare experiences.

High-Level Overview

In order to achieve the goal of open payments with any payment app, the system works by redirecting the rider into a web-based payment experience. Through this web-based payment experience, the rider inputs their payment details and the 3rd party payment app processes the payment. Once the payment is processed, the web-based experience will redirect the web view back into Spare systems. Once redirected back to Spare systems, the rider experience will complete the their purchase.

Here is an example mock up of how the flow could look like. We can see that in this case the 3rd party developers registered a new payment app with Spare called MyFavoriteGateway.

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Limitations

  1. Payments through Spare Admin Portal. Open Payments SDK is primarily designed to be used for integrating into rider experiences. When completing a payment, the customer will be redirected to the payment app where they need to enter their details. Spare can perform the redirection for the booking agent, but this may require a certified booking facility that is enabled to collect payment details over the phone from the rider.
  2. Payments through Spare Driver. Driver App bookings (flag downs) are not currently supported with Open Payments SDK.
  3. Native ability to support payment methods. When Stripe is integrated into Spare, we natively support all the different payment methods that customers register as separate entities within Spare. This gives the customers the ability to select the right payment method before completing their purchase. When integrating with Open Payments SDK this is not possible. The rider would be presented with just one option. We can show an icon and the user friendly name of the gateway. That being said, nothing is preventing the 3rd party payment app to store payment methods on their end and support giving the customer a choice of one of their previously used payment methods.

How the payments app flow works

Spare will interact with the third party payment app in the following way whenever there is a reason for payment. Currently Spare provides the following experiences that require the payment flows: