Implementing a Prebuilt Checkout

Gain a basic understanding of how to add a Prebuilt Checkout to your site

Prebuilt Checkout is a customizable checkout experience that allows you to connect an upstream commerce system with Digital River's local pricing, logistics, subscriptions, payment, fraud detection, tax exemption, and disclosure services.

The Prebuilt Checkout solution reduces the complexity of integrating with the Digital River APIs and our front-end libraries, thereby shortening your time to deployment.

Once customers build a cart and initiate checkout, a Prebuilt Checkout integration needs to:

Building a cart

During the early stages of an ecommerce transaction, customers land on your storefront, review products and build a cart. Unless you engage our local pricing service, Digital River is typically not involved in these early pre-checkout interactions. However, once customers initiate checkout, you'll need to start interacting with Prebuilt Checkout.

Initiating checkout

Add a click event listener to each checkout button on your site. Handle the event by defining a checkout-session request, passing that request data to your back-end server, and then securely sending a create checkout-session request.

Digital River returns a unique checkout-session identifier that you must pass, along with an optional configuration object, to a create checkout window method on your front-end.

Configuring a checkout-session

For details, refer to the Checkout-sessions page.

Creating a checkout-session

To create a checkout-session, send your secret API key and request payload in a POST /drop-in/checkout-sessions.

curl --location --request POST 'https://api.digitalriver.com/drop-in/checkout-sessions' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer <secret API key>' \
...
--data-raw '{
    "currency": "USD",
    "customerType": "individual",
    "taxInclusive": false,
    "items": [
        {
            "skuId": "b535d75a-a6ee-4f63-be4d-c2e2537efec7",
            "quantity": 1,
            "price": 5
        }
    ],
    "shipFrom": {
        "address": {
            "line1": "10380 Bren Rd W",
            "line2": "",
            "city": "Minnetonka",
            "postalCode": "55129",
            "state": "MN",
            "country": "US"
        }
    },
    "options": {
        "shippingMethods": [
            {
                "amount": 5,
                "description": "standard",
                "serviceLevel": "SG"
            },
            {
                "amount": 15,
                "description": "next day",
                "serviceLevel": "ND"
            }
        ],
        "addresses": [
            {
                "address": {
                    "line1": "10380 Bren Rd W",
                    "line2": "line 2",
                    "city": "Minnetonka",
                    "postalCode": "55129",
                    "state": "MN",
                    "country": "US"
                },
                "name": "John Smith",
                "phone": "952-111-1111",
                "email": "jsmith@digitalriver.com",
                "organization": "Digital River",
                "additionalAddressInfo": {
                    "neighborhood": "Centro",
                    "division": "営業部",
                    "phoneticName": "ヤマダ タロ"
                }
            },
            {
                "address": {
                    "line1": "62 Trinity Crescent",
                    "line2": "",
                    "city": "WHITCHURCH",
                    "postalCode": "CF4 9ZB",
                    "country": "GB"
                },
                "name": "Anna Brawner",
                "phone": "07854319925",
                "email": "anna@dr.com",
                "organization": "Digital River",
                "additionalAddressInfo": {
                    "neighborhood": "Centro",
                    "division": "営業部",
                    "phoneticName": "ヤマダ タロ"
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}'

The checkout-session identifier

A 201 Created response to your create checkout-session request contains a unique id.

{
    "id": "eb3b9cc3-d068-4300-9488-c88c0341b5db"
    ...
}

Use this checkout-session identifier to create a Prebuilt Checkout.

Make sure you include DigitalRiverCheckout.js by adding the following script to your checkout page.

<script src="https://checkout.digitalriverws.com/v1/DigitalRiverCheckout.js"></script>

Use your public API key to create a DigitalRiverCheckout object.

Next, you'll most likely want to build a configuration object.

Then, depending on whether you'd like Prebuilt Checkout to display in a modal or an iframe, pass that object and the checkout session identifier to either createModal() or embed(), respectively.

document.getElementById('YOUR_CHECKOUT_BUTTON_ID').addEventListener('click', async (event) => {
  
   //Invokes a client defined function that creates a checkout session
   const checkoutSessionId = await createCheckoutSession();
  
   // Creates a Prebuilt Checkout and displays it in a modal window
   drCheckout.createModal(checkoutSessionId, config);
});

document.getElementById('YOUR_CHECKOUT_BUTTON_ID').addEventListener('click', async (event) => {
  
   //Invokes a client defined function that creates a checkout session
   const checkoutSessionId = await createCheckoutSession();
  
   // Creates a Prebuilt Checkout and displays it in an iframe
   drCheckout.embed(checkoutSessionId, config);
});

After createModal() or embed() is invoked, the checkout window opens and onReady executes.

Depending on how the checkout-session is configured, the experience takes customers through various stages:

Name and address stage

In this stage, customers are always required to provide their name, phone number, email and billing address.

Other required inputs, and available options, depend on whether the checkout involves:

Once customers successfully submit the required information, onAddressComplete executes.

Digital and physical products

If any items[] in the checkout-session represent physical products, customers are prompted for shipping information. Once validated, Digital River uses it to populate the checkout-session's shipTo and billTo.

Customers are given the option to input different billing information during the payment stage.

In checkouts that only contain digital products, the experience doesn’t ask for shipping details. Instead, it simply prompts customers for billing information.

Registered customers

If you send customerId in the create checkout-session request, customers are given the option to save their shipping and billing information for use in future checkouts. Additionally, if you pass options.addresses[], customers are presented with these saved addresses for convenience purposes.

Business to business transactions

If the checkout-session's customerType is business, then customers must provide their company's name when entering both shipping and billing information.

If you activate the auto collect customer type feature, then customers are shown a checkbox that asks them whether they’d like to make the purchase on behalf of a business.

If items[] contains physical goods, then this toggle is displayed in the shipping information form. Otherwise, when items[] are all digital, customers are presented with this option while supplying their billing information.

Shipping choice stage

In transactions that contain physical products, the experience next prompts the user to make a shipping choice. For each options.shippingMethods[] in the checkout-session, customers are always shown its description and amount.

Once customers input their shipping choice, onDeliveryComplete executes.

Tax identifiers stage

In applicable checkouts, the experience prompts the customer for a tax identification number.

In guest checkouts, customers can enter a tax identifier but are not given the option to save the value to their account.

Registered customers with applicable, saved tax identifiers can either select one of the values presented to them or enter a new one.

Registered customers who have no stored, transaction-applicable tax identifiers can save a new value for use in future checkouts. If they select this option, Digital River saves the tax identifier to the customer’s record.

In countries that require tax identifiers, customers must enter a value before proceeding to the payment stage.

Payment stage

In the payment collection stage, customers are only shown payment methods that are appropriate to the transaction. Depending on how you configure the checkout-session and on your Digital River Dashboard settings, the experience can also:

Once customers provide payment, agree to the terms, and successfully submit the order, onCheckoutComplete is called.

Saved payment methods

If you pass a customerId in the create checkout session request, we retrieve and display any transaction-applicable payment sources[] that are saved to the referenced customer.

Save a payment method for future purchases

Prebuilt Checkout can ask customers whether they'd like to save a payment method for future purchases.

To activate this feature, you must pass customerId in the create checkout session request.

If the resource you reference doesn't exist in your account, then Digital River creates a new customer and assigns it the identifier you passed.

If the payment method selected by customers supports reusability, then customers are asked whether they'd like to save it for future purchases. If they opt to do so, then, after Digital River creates the source, we save it to that customer.

Custom consents

For each displayed payment method, Prebuilt Checkout presents users with the terms of sale and privacy policy of the designated selling entity.

If you save your own consents in the Dashboard, then they are appended to Digital River's disclosures. Customers must accept all these terms and disclosures before they are allowed to complete the purchase.

To determine what disclosures customers accepted, you can configure a webhook to listen for the event with a type of checkout_session.order.created.

If you don't save customized consents in Dashboard, then Prebuilt Checkout only displays Digital River's disclosures.