Rainforest supports processing payins with various payment methods:

• Card - debit or credit cards on all major card brands, including Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express
• Apple Pay - debit or credit cards through the Apple Pay wallet
• ACH - US bank accounts
• Validated ACH - US bank accounts collected by the user authenticating into their online bank account

A payment method is identified by the payment_method_id in the Rainforest ecosystem. The prefix for a payment_method_id is mtd_ on Production and sbx_mtd_ on Sandbox.

Active payment methods can be used to process recurring payins with the create a payin from a stored payment method endpoint.

Billable merchant

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Each payment method has a Billable Merchant, indicated by the billable_merchant_id on the get payment method endpoint. The billable merchant indicates to Rainforest who to pass the billing fees onto when running processes such as Card Account Updater or BIN Lookup.

Payment methods can be utilized across merchants, but only one merchant will be billed for processes such as CAU.

When creating a payment method via processing a payin, the billable merchant will be assigned to the merchant the payin was processed for. The billable merchant can be updated via the update payment method endpoint, if necessary.

Payin from a stored payment method

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A payin can be created from a stored payment method by sending the payment_method_id received from capturing a previous payin or storing a payment method via the payment component.

Creating a payin from a stored payment method can be utilized to run a new one-time payin or for recurring or installment payins. The platform is responsible for maintaining the recurring schedule and submitting the payment_method_id in the request each time a new payin is requested to be processed.

The process, statuses, and responses are the same for a payin from a stored payment method as a new payin processed from the payment component.

Statuses

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The payment method status is the descriptor of the current status in the life cycle of the payment method.