Card on file: customer-initiated (CIT) and merchant-initiated (MIT) charges
Charging a card you have already seen once is a two-part sequence. The first part is a customer-initiated transaction (CIT), where the customer is at checkout and the charge runs on a fresh token. The second part is a merchant-initiated transaction (MIT), which is an upsell or a later charge made without the customer present using the payment instrument returned by the CIT.
Customers
A customer is the entity that purchases goods or services from a merchant. A customer may be a person or an organization. Every customer has a unique id referenced from other resources as customerId.
Invoices
An invoice is a commercial document issued by a merchant to a customer for products or services. In Payments AI an invoice is generated by an order and tracks the lifecycle of one specific charge — typically a single subscription renewal or a one-time order.
Orders
16 items
Organizations
An Organization is the top-level entity in Payments AI. It represents you, or your company, as a merchant. When you first sign in to Payments AI you are prompted to create one. Every API call addresses an Organization explicitly through organizationId in the URL path or header.
Payment instrument lifecycle
A payment instrument moves through a defined set of states. The state decides whether Payments AI can auto-charge it, meaning charge it as a merchant-initiated transaction, without the customer present. No state makes an instrument usable for a customer-present charge; those always run on a fresh token. See Card on file.
Payment instruments
A payment instrument is any way a customer makes a digital payment: credit card, debit card, direct debit, payment service provider (PayPal and similar), or digital wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay).
Pricing
A product could have different pricing depending on the plan. You could choose from 5 groups of pricing when setting up this property.
Products and plans
Products and plans together define what the customer is buying and how they are charged for it. A product is the thing being sold; a plan is the pricing template applied to that product.
Recurring interval
recurringInterval describes the subscription cadence — when and how often a subscription renews. This is a subscription-level concept (the cadence is applied to subscriptions), not a direct field on the Plan resource.
Refunds
A refund returns funds to the customer for a transaction that has already been captured. You can refund either the full amount or a partial amount. For step-by-step instructions, see Refund a transaction.
Transaction statuses
A transaction has three independent fields that together describe its state and outcome: status, result, and type. Payments AI also exposes a combinedStatus field that merges status and result into a single value for display.
Transactions
A transaction is an instance of an action that requires a payment. Every charge, authorization, refund, and card verification on Payments AI is a transaction.
Trial
A trial is a free or reduced-price period at the start of a subscription. You configure it on the plan, and it applies whenever a subscription is created against that plan.