Our platform feature lets you support complex, multi-party payment flows. It allows your business to onboard and manage connected merchants, process payments on their behalf, and view overall transaction volume in one place. Whether you run a marketplace, SaaS platform, or crowdfunding service, you can facilitate direct payments from your customers to businesses on your platform - while maintaining visibility and control.

Getting Started

Follow the steps below to start:

Step 1: Contact us

Reach out to us at [email protected] if you’d like to start using this feature. Our team will review your needs and confirm whether our platform can support your business model.

Step 2: Scope your integration

Your Shift4 representative will collaborate with you to plan and design your implementation.

Step 3: Create an account

Sign up at dev.shift4.com. Our support team will provide you with access to platform support.

Step 4: Build and test your integration

Your account includes test API keys so you can start building your integration immediately. Visit our GitHub and documentation for guidance during the implementation process.

Step 5: Go live

Replace your test API keys with live keys, and you’ll be ready to start processing real transactions.

Managing your business

As a platform account, you can manage your own payments and data directly. The Dashboard shows information for your account by default. To view a connected merchant’s data, go to their details page for an overview or switch to viewing the Dashboard from the merchant’s perspective.

You can view the Dashboard from the perspective of the connected merchant by clicking “***” in the merchant list and selecting "View dashboard" as merchant or from the merchant's details page.

When viewing the Dashboard as a merchant, your user permissions remain unchanged:

• Administrators can create and manage objects on behalf of merchants.

• Read-only users can view the merchant’s data but cannot make changes.

Making API Requests on Behalf of your Merchants

You can use the API to perform actions in different contexts:

• Your platform account

• Any merchant account connected to your platform

When sending a request on behalf of a merchant, you must include the merchant ID along with your API key. There are several ways to do this.

In our backend SDK, one can pass the Merchant ID as an additional parameter when initializing the SDK or as an additional option along the requests.

If you are not using our SDK you can pass Merchant ID in the HTTP request header Shift4-Merchant: <Merchant ID>.

In shift4.js Merchant ID can be passed as an additional parameter during initialization:

const shift4 = Shift4("pk_test_api_key_of_your_platform", {merchantId: "mrc_specificMerchantIdentifier"})