Receipts

Overview

The government has strict rules about what information you must display on an order's receipt. Forage makes it easy to comply with these rules. Forage will make a Receipt object available to your app, so you can display the information to your customer. We recommend that you display it on your order confirmation page and email.

FNS Requirements

The USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) requires merchants to provide EBT customers with certain information upon the completion or failure of a transaction. Specifically, merchants will need to display the following data on the receipt page (bolded items are not provided by Forage server),

• Merchant name
• Merchant contact information for order problems (e.g. customer support email or telephone number)
• Date and time of transaction
• Order or Refund reference number (either Forage reference number or you can supply your own)
• Identify if the transaction is a Refund or Purchase
• Transacted Amount
• Balance on SNAP and EBT Cash accounts of the EBT card
• Last 4 digits of PAN (EBT card number)
• Receipt message from EBT network (see below).
• The following data is needed for purchases only (it is not needed for refunds):
  • Delivery/pickup/shipping address
  • Actual/estimated delivery/pickup time
  • Itemized fees for delivery/pickup/shipping, ordering, convenience, handling or other fees or charges
  • Itemized fees for bags or other delivery/pickup/shipping containers

In addition to displaying this information on screen after the transaction is submitted, FNS requires that merchants either,

1. Send this same receipt information in an email to the customer within 24 hours of the transaction, OR
2. Provide a password-authenticated page on the merchant's website for customers to view their order history.

Receipt messages

The EBT payment network will respond with informational messages when Forage forwards your transaction requests. The FNS requires that this message is displayed to the EBT cardholder on your receipt page.

The required receipt message is in the "message" field of the receipt object attached to an Order or Refund response. In most cases, this message will be "Approved" if the transaction succeeded. If the transaction failed, the receipt message will identify the error to the user. For example, one possible receipt message for a failed transaction is "Invalid PIN".

How does Forage Help

For the convenience of our merchant partners, Forage will provide all of the necessary receipt information as a field on Order and Refund response objects. This field will be null until the /api/orders/{ref}/capture endpoint has been called for orders, for both successes or failures. For refunds, the receipt information will be available immediately upon creating the Refund.

Forage will provide as much of the receipt information as possible. However, some information will need to be provided by merchants because it is not stored on Forage's server. The information which must be provided by merchants has been bolded in the list above.