The Budget Period is a feature available in South Africa for credit card transactions. It allows the user to pay for the purchase in installments.
The merchant is paid in full for the order amount and the issuing bank charges the user in installments.
Important Note - Budget Period feature is only available for Credit Cards issued in South Africa i.e. it does NOT work with Debit Cards or International cards.
- Budget period is only applied to local credit cards where the facility is available.
- Local debit cards are processed as straight debit i.e. budget period = 0 – the bank will ignore the budget period selected by the user if a debit card is used and the user is charged the FULL order amount.
- International cards – same behavior as for local debit cards.
Our Recommendation:
We would recommend that merchants explicitly inform the customer during the checkout that should budget period not be available on their card then the transaction will process as a regular debit i.e. straight debit with 0 budget period.
How to Implement:
Please contact your Peach Payments account manager to assist you in enabling this feature for your merchant account.
In order to enable the budget period feature on your site please complete the following steps:
- Add the drop down menu in your checkout process to allow the user to select the desire number of months over the which the payments are split
- Acceptable budget period values: 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36
- Add the user's selected value in the following parameter to the Prepare CheckoutID / Payment transaction request-
- recurring.numberOfInstallments
- Please note that the parameter name is case sensitive
See below technical integration information