Customer Initiated Transactions (CIT)

CIT are transactions happening on a checkout page (e.g.: straight sales or initials).

Flow

1. The customer proceeds to check out and provides their details and payment info. If the payment transaction is accepted, Flex remains invisible.
2. If the customer payment transaction is declined, Flex is invoked. The customer is not informed of the declined payment and Flex assesses the transaction within a couple of seconds. If the transaction is not eligible, our service responds with a decline. The customer in this case is shown the usual payment decline message. If the transaction is eligible, our service responds with a session key, used to activate our UI widget. This might trigger our UI to request some additional info from the customer. Most times however this is not required and the customer experience is completely frictionless.
3. Payment transaction is confirmed by Flex. This confirmation is notified via the webhook and is also available via API. Since most of Flex orders do not require any customer interaction, in most cases the customer's experience is completely frictionless.

User Experience

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To visualize the CIT customer experience, you can try it yourself with our demo shop

Scenario 1: Frictionless rescue

Under this scenario, Flex rescues the payment transaction without asking for any customer interaction. Customers are just informed that their order was successful and are redirected to the success screen of the merchant.

Scenario 2: Rescue requiring some user interaction

Under this scenario, Flex needs to interact with the customer and ask for some additional information. For example, if the CVV provided by the customer was wrong, we would ask for the CVV again.

Scenario 3: Payment transaction is declined by Flex

Under this scenario, the declined transaction sent to Flex is considered not eligible for our service. In this case the decline is confirmed by Flex and the customer is redirected to the decline screen of the merchant.

Merchant Initiated Transactions (MIT)

MIT are transactions where the merchant initiates the payment on behalf of the customer, without the customer actively participating in the transaction (e.g.: recurring subscriptions).

Flow

On a decline of a recurring payment, transaction is sent over to Flex for a period of time.

During this period, Flex will send status update notifications via webhook:

• approved: transaction was rescued by Flex
• expired: Flex wasn't able to rescue this transaction during the expiry date.

User Experience

For the MIT use case, most of the time there is no interaction required but, depending on the decline error, we might contact the customer via email or SMS inviting them to provide an alternative payment method.