Starting with a minimum viable product (MVP) can result in significant advantages including reducing initial resource requirements, decreasing your time to revenue, and inviting internal and external feedback to ensure you are working on the most valuable features and functionality.

Where to start

It's tempting to start with integrating merchant onboarding, but we recommend starting with payins for two reasons.

You can onboard merchants manually through our portal for your initial merchants
Payins can be implemented quickly increasing confidence and familiarity with the Rainforest platform

Integrate Payins

Start by taking a quick read of our Understanding payins article and then move to Take a payment on the web. Here are a few use cases to start with:

Run a successful card payment
Run a declined card payment (Note: You can simulate declines utilizing the drop down in our sandbox payin component.)
Configure the look & feel of the payment receipt using our component or a custom UI

If you are looking to integrate card present payments, please review the take an in-person payment article

Implement reporting tools

Your merchants will want to be able to see the payments they've processed through you and also view the deposits to their account. Use our embeddable components to quickly add this functionality to your platform.

Note: Rainforest strongly recommends including at least deposit reporting as part of your MVP; however, reporting is not required to go-live.

Starting Use-Cases:

Deposits

Display a deposit report for a merchant. Pay attention to session keys to ensure merchants can only see their own data.
Display deposit activity for a given deposit

Payments

Display a payment list report for a merchant. Session keys are important here as well
Display a payment details report for a transaction
Run a refund from the payment details component report

Custom Reporting: If you are looking to build custom reporting tools using our API, please review our payments and deposit APIs.

Think about webhooks

Ensure you're listening to important events to keep your system in sync and provide useful data back to your merchants.

Important events include:

Note: While you can use the portal to onboard merchants initially, we still recommend listening to merchant and merchant application webhooks, to ensure you and/or the merchant are notified about changes in an application's status.

Create a new billing profile and test merchant within sandbox portal

Create a new billing profile via the billing tab on the left side of the portal
Onboard a merchant with the new billing profile by specifying the billing profile in the create merchant API call or by using the merchant tab and "Add new merchant" button
Recommended: Take a test payment against the new merchant

Taking your payments product to the next level

Once you've completed MVP, learn how to enhance your product's functionality Additional functionality includes Apple Pay, storing payment methods, embedded merchant onboarding, and much more!