Overview
Flutterwave Inline, Standard, and HTML checkout make it easy for you to collect payments via card, bank, or any of our supported methods with one integration. However, they're bundled with the Flutterwave UI, branding and experience.
Sometimes you want more control, or a custom solution that fits in with your app. That's where direct charge comes in. We provide the APIs to charge customers, but you collect their payment information yourself and bring your own UI and payment flow. This means you can customize and control the customer's experience as you wish.
With direct charge, you'll have to integrate separately for each payment method you want to support, which can be tasking. Use direct charge only when your customers will be using a specific payment method (like cards or banks).
How does direct charge work?
There are three main stages in direct charge:
- Initiate the payment: You send the transaction details and the customer's payment details to the appropriate charge endpoints.
- Authorize the charge: The customer authorizes the charge with their payment provider, such as their card issuer or bank. This completes the charge.
- Verify the payment: As a failsafe, you'll call our API to verify that the payment was successful before giving value (the verify transaction endpoint).
These steps vary depending on the payment method (for example, card charge may include multiple authorization steps). We'll explain what applies to each method in its guide.
Direct charge options
Here are the different options for collecting payments via direct charge. Each type of direct charge has its own unique requirements and authorization flow. Follow the links to view detailed guides for each type:
- Cards
- Bank accounts (Nigeria, UK, US/South Africa)
- Mobile money (M-Pesa, Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Francophone countries)
- USSD
- Bank transfer
- Third party (GooglePay, ApplePay)
Webhooks
When working with direct charge, webhooks are useful tools to know when a charge has been authorized by the customer. See our webhooks guide to learn how to work with them.
As a backup, you can also poll for the status of a pending charge at regular intervals (say, 5 minutes). This way, you can still get updates if your webhook endpoint is down or webhooks are delayed.