Getting Started


Accepting payments with Shift4 is easy and requires a few simple steps.

Integration using Components

Using Components is more complicated than using Checkout - yet, it allows you to have full control over the look and feel of the payment form and integrate it more seamlessly into your website.

For more information, please go to the Components tutorial.

Integration using Checkout

Using Checkout allows for the fastest and easiest integration, as all the hard work is handled by Shift4.

For more information, please go to the Checkout tutorial.


Next steps

Saving cards for later use

To save card data for later use, you need to create a customer and use it to save a card. That card can be later used to create multiple charges - without requiring the user to retype his card data (read more).

Creating automatically recurring subscriptions

When you already have a customer with a saved card - it is easy to start charging that customer periodically. To do so, two things are necessary. The first one is a plan that defines how much and how often the card will be charged. The second thing is a subscription that combines a customer with a plan.

Receiving events

Once you start using advanced features like subscriptions, you may want to be notified about events that occurred in the system, not as a result of your direct actions. An example of such an event could be the automatic creation of a charge due to a subscription entering the next billing cycle. Another example could be a customer starting a dispute over the charge that you made. If you are interested in receiving events read more about webhooks.