A Better Payments Partnership and the Developer Experience - Featured Image

A Better Payments Partnership and the Developer Experience

By Fortis |

Every independent software vendor (ISV) knows that finding or developing a customer-centric experience is only a piece of the puzzle. For a truly effective solution, the backend needs to be seamless and easily maintained. One way to make this possible is through a developer portal. 

The developer experience is crucial for any integration. From documentation to specific features, an ISV’s developers should be able to effortlessly navigate a payment application programming interface (API). 

The Fortis API is just that – intuitive, robust, and award-winning. Even more, our developer portal encompasses a suite of sandbox tools with SDKs, Postman Collections, request inspector, sample code, and a team collaboration dashboard. 

Here are a few reasons why it’s important to choose a partner with a developer portal.

The Importance of the Developer Portal

A seamless, intuitive developer experience centers around the Developer Portal. From this interface, the developer should understand the general layout of their configuration and have an overview of their projects. 

The portal layout should be clear and precise, especially the navigation. It may sound like a small factor, but finding everything easily is important. Especially for developers who likely have a nearly infinite number of tasks to complete. 

A developer should be able to quickly locate their project management screen to review specific project details. In addition to key project details, developers tend to prefer self-service portions, being able to invite team members, quickly visit the documentation, and contact the dedicated integration support team.  

There are several key features every developer portal should have, including: 

  • The ability to change the merchant’s configuration 
  • Adding ACH and CC accounts to simulate multi-merchant configurations 
  • Being able to create and modify unlimited mock devices from their dashboard 
  • A real-time, sandbox environment for mock devices that realistically respond to API requests to test EMV card transactions 
  • Test data to simulate real scenarios 
  • A log to review, search, and filter all API requests 
  • An easy way to review good/bad requests in the log, such as color coding the rows 
  • In-depth data on every transaction for easy troubleshooting and pinpointing bugs 

The more detailed information your developer portal can provide, the better. Developer tools that provide mock devices and comprehensive transaction information significantly reduce time spent debugging and searching for basic data. As a result, the developer can complete tasks faster. 

The Fortis Platform uses Open API Specification (OAS), a standard language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs, providing developers with both support and freedom when integrating a solution. We support multiple programming languages, such as .Net, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and Typescript, making our developer portal easy for self-service use, saving you time and your bottom line. 

First Impressions: The Documentation

Before any developer plugs into the dashboard and begins using the API, they will look at the documentation. Thorough documentation showcases how robust your solution will likely be and how easy it will be to navigate.  

In addition to having any easy documentation link within the developer portal, it can be helpful to offer: 

  • Try requests from within the docs – Developers should be able to test requests within the docs themselves for easier error handling and management.  
  • Postman collections – This is essentially a collection of API requests, already saved, organized, and ready for use. 
  • Full software development kit (SDK) – A full SDK allows developers to streamline and customize an integration and is an essential component for any ISV.  

The Fortis Platform’s API documentation site supports real-time testing within the site and SDK generation. 

Getting Started with an Award-Winning API

A mature payment API is built with customers and developers in mind. That’s why our team at Fortis developed our payments API and documentation to be an intuitive experience for everyone. In addition to our step-by-step tutorials, robust developer portal, SDKs, and real-time code consoles, our API has won several awards. 

Since 2018, the Fortis API has been recognized as a “Best of Breed” system for: 

  • Developer and API onboarding 
  • APIs offered 
  • Overall API assessment 
  • API set 

Experience the Fortis difference yourself in our thorough API documentation or setup a sandbox account today.