Head over to the zendit sign up page and setup an account. You’ll be able to get an API key for the test mode environment to kick the tires and play with the API. It’s free to sign up.
An asynchronous API is a type of application programming interface (API) that allows clients to send requests without waiting for immediate responses. Asynchronous APIs are also known as non-blocking or event-driven APIs.
Main Benefits of an asynchronous API inlcude:
Scalability: Asynchronous APIs can handle a large number of requests simultaneously
Resilience: Asynchronous APIs are more resilient to temporary failures because requests can be retried
Performance: Asynchronous APIs improve performance, especially when dealing with slow external services
In the asynchronous zendit API, you can expect to receive an acknowledgement of a transaction sent immediately and zendit will process the transaction in the background until completion. You may use a strategy of polling the transaction every second until it has completed or setup a webhook for zendit to send the result of transactions so your application can send the transaction and then receive a response as soon as it is completed.
99% of zendit transactions complete within 15 seconds but during a time of high load, transactions might take a little longer to process. By accepting a transaction and then processing it without a client holding the connection open for the response, zendit can achieve a larger load for our partners by allocating resources where they are needed most for processing the transactions and interacting with our fulfillment providers.
Zendit provides:
Zendit provides catalogs per product type. Mobile Topup, Mobile Data and Mobile Bundles are provided by the /topups endpoints. Digital Gift Cards and Prepaid utilities are provided by the /vouchers endpoints. eSIMs are provided by the /esim endpoints. See Zendit University’s catalog documentation and the API Specification for more information.
Zendit provides up to 2 prices in the catalog (cost and price) and for products that have value that is transferred, a sent value. Not all products will provide a sent value since Mobile Bundles, Mobile Data and eSIM products deliver plans that have a term, amount of data, minutes or SMS that is included in the plan that don’t have a currency value when transferred.
To understand the pricing see Zendit University’s catalog documentation and the API Specification for more information.
Price is the suggested value to sell the product to customers. In the zendit catalog console, this price can be adjusted by the desired margin or a specific price. Cost is the value that will be deducted from the zendit wallet when the product is fulfilled.
On catalogs, 2 data structures are included in each catalog item. One is price and the other is cost. Within each structure will be the following values:
currency – identifies the currency for the values
fixed – identifies the value when the product is a fixed price product
min – identifies the minimum value when the product is an open range product
max – identifies the maximum value when the product is an open range product
fx – identifies the FX value used for the values applied to the currency of the zendit wallet on the account
Fixed price products have a single price, cost and benefit delivered in either currency in the destination of the product or data, sms and voice amounts depending on the product type. Each of these products contain a predefined amount of benefit and a specific cost to the wallet and price that it can be sold to a customer.
Open range products allow a range of values to be delivered and contain a minimum value and maximum value. The value that can be delivered by the product is variable depending on the value in range that is purchased. Value can be purchased using either the price set on the catalog that the product is being sold or the local value desired to be sent.
See Zendit University’s catalog documentation and the API Specification for more information.
When registering your account, you’ll be asked which currency you would like to use for funding your account. Currently zendit supports US Dollars, Great Britain Pound Sterling, and Euro.
Test mode wallets can be managed from the client portal and will initially have a balance of 1,000 USD, GBP, or EUR based on the currency selected when setting up. The test mode wallet can be modified to add funds from the console or deplete it for testing scenarios when the wallet balance is insufficient to fulfill a product.
Production wallets are funded using wire transfer payments. Instructions are available in the client portal for your wallet. Please contact sales@zendit.io for additional payment options that may be available for your account.
Zendit performs a small set of checks at the time of submission of the transaction for completeness of payload and verifies the offer ID corresponds to a catalog item and the transaction Id sent through is unique. When a transaction meets these limited criteria, it will be ACCEPTED by zendit.
As the transaction progresses through zendit and to the provider additional checks are performed by zendit and the downstream provider for the product that may result in a failure of the transaction. These include not enough balance in your zendit account to purchase the transaction, an invalid phone number for the destination country, an invalid phone number for the provider of the product, temporary outages of the provider for the product, incompatible products for the phone number provided. You will find a list of error codes that zendit responds with and messages for the most common errors in the error guide.
The most common error is caused by the “value” structure on the request. For fixed price offers, the “value” structure is omitted because the product has a single cost, price and sent benefits. Sending the “value” structure through on the product produces an error because the value cannot be changed.
When purchasing an open range offer, this structure must be included to specify what value the offer should provide and whether you are selling it using PRICE from the catalog price or by ZEND which is specifying the local amount the customer should receive. ZEND is an approximate value to be sent and may be rounded down due to currency fluctuations. See more in the transaction guide.
