Getting Started With Forage Payments API

This page will help you get started with Forage. You'll be up and running in a jiffy!

The Forage Payments API is a REST API that allows you to process Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) payments in your e-commerce application. Forage also provides a secure user interface for collecting an EBT cardholders's PIN, called Forage Checkout. A PIN entry is necessary to process all EBT payments, and to check the balances of an EBT card.

All PIN data must be collected through a PCI-compliant and USDA approved web form, per federal regulations. Because Forage Checkout is specifically designed to follow these regulations, you will always need to redirect your user to the Forage Checkout UI to process an EBT payment. Furthermore, certain endpoints (capture/ and balance/) are only accessible through Forage Checkout, because they require PIN data in the request body.

In most cases, an Order cannot be paid for with EBT payments alone, because not all items are eligible for EBT under federal guidelines (e.g. delivery fees). Therefore, you will need to consider how to process "split tender", credit card payments in conjunction with Forage EBT processing. Refer to the split tender decision tree to consider your options.

As a general principle, any data created by your application’s requests or your users on Forage Checkout is available through GET requests to the appropriate resource.

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