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How to connect Adyen

Learn how to add Adyen for accepting card payments & enabling alternative methods like Klarna, Afterpay, iDEAL, SEPA, etc. for your store.

Updated over 7 months ago

Adyen is one of the most popular online payment processing platforms for e-commerce. It helps merchants to accept 💳 credit and debit card payments (Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, American Express, Discover and Diners, China UnionPay, JCB, Cartes Bancaires, Interac, etc.).


It is also possible to activate such third-party payment services as iDEAL, Sofort, SEPA Direct Debit, Afterpay and dozens of others for your Checkify checkout page via Adyen. For more info about this payment provider and the payment methods this integration unlocks please visit: https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods

In this article:

1. Pre-connection checklist

To enable Adyen as a payment gateway on your store, you must have an Adyen live account. If you do not have one, please read their Get started with Adyen.

Also note that the minimal transaction you can have on Adyen is (equivalent to) €0.02.

ATTENTION: Most of the payment methods require presence of shipping (details) fields. Therefore, if you are customizing the checkout's address form, keep in mind that some methods may stop working correctly because of that.

Please monitor this case. If a payment method stopped working after introducing a custom shipping form for your checkout, deactivate such a method in your Adyen account or roll back to the initial version of the form.

2. Setting up Adyen on Checkify's checkout

Visit admin > Payment methods to get started. Keep this page open in a tab.

2.1 Request a new merchant account or use existing

  1. Log in to your live Customer Area on Adyen.

  2. Go to Settings > Merchant accounts, and press Request new merchant account.

  3. In the desired Account code field, enter the name for this merchant account. For example: AbicartABECOM
    Note: Changing the name of the merchant account is only possible if you have not processed any transactions through this merchant account yet.

  4. In the Sales channel drop-down, select whether you are using this merchant account for processing eCommerce.

  5. In Payment methods, select the payment methods for the new existing merchant account.
    You can add more payment methods at any time.

  6. Select Submit (Create account).

  7. Add your merchant account name to Checkify into the corresponding field. Also you can use your existing merchant account:

2.2 Generate your API key, Client key (or use existing) and get your API URL Prefix

  1. Log in to your live Customer Area.

  2. Go to Developers > API credentials. In the Username column click on the API credential username for your integration. For example: ws@Company.[YourCompanyAccount], with the type Web Service.

  3. Under Server settings > Authentication select the API key tab.

  4. Press Generate API key button.

  5. Select the copy icon and paste the key to Checkify into the corresponding field.

  6. Then scroll down in the same window and find Client settings > Authentication. From this section, copy your generated Client key.

    Then paste it to Checkify into the corresponding field.

  7. Press Save changes button in your Adyen live account.

Then go to Developers > API URLs > Prefix and get your Prefix:

Copy your prefix and paste it to Checkify into the corresponding field.

After this action return to Checkify and click Connect + button:

2.3 Additional options

When adding Adyen as a payment method on Checkify, you will also able to configure additional options:

i. Target countries

You can select specific countries or regions for which this payment method will be displayed.

3. How Adyen will work on your checkout

3.1 Direct transfer of payment data

Our integration allows secure transfer of the customer's payment data directly to Adyen while using a unique design of the payment info section. The payment data fields are loaded directly from Adyen’s servers. It means that Checkify does not handle or has any access to your customers' card data.

You may visit our Demo store, proceed to the checkout and have a look at the example of the setup in the Payment Methods block.

3.2 3D Secure payment protection

Adyen leverages its own 3DS Engine by default, which means that all payments are fraud-protected and compliant with the European Directives. The 3D Secure screen is shown only when requested by the bank of a customer.

3.3 Redirect and non-redirect payment methods

Some alternative payment methods available on Adyen are working either as a direct payment, when a buyer does not leave the checkout page and is redirected to the "Thank you" page upon the successful payment's completion, or as a redirect. In the latter case, the payment will be completed on the special page of the selected method, where a buyer lands (redirected) from the Checkify checkout. Then, depending on the status, the buyer will either see a "Success" message and is subsequently redirected to the Checkify "Thank you" page, or will get a "Fail" message and remain on the checkout page.

The statuses of such payment attempts are accompanied with messages:

Failed status after the redirect to Checkify's checkout

Success status after the redirect to Checkify's checkout

The texts of the messages above can be edited, customized and translated (manually) in the Localizaion section of the Checkify admin.

All payment methods initially perform a pre-authorization of the payment sum and then, upon a successful charge on the bank's side, Adyen changes the status of the payment to either Failed or Success. In such cases payment processing may take from couple of minutes to seven days. It is being managed by Adyen and Checkify has no influence on it, and has no ability to speed it up. You can track the status of such orders in your Shopify admin. It is not recommended to ship an order to your customer when "Payment pending" status is seen. When the payment status changes to "Paid", feel free to dispatch the order:

Example of Payment pending situation. It is better to wait for the status to change

Once the processing by Adyen is over, the status on Shopify changes automatically to either Paid or Void (if Adyen returned a Failed status):

Example of Paid status in Shopify order

Example of Void (=failed and unsuccessful) status in Shopify order

3.4 Unsupported payment methods

Some payment methods are available on Adyen but currently are not supported by Adyen-Checkify integration due to technical limitations. The list is given below:

Oney, Blik, PayPal (for PayPal integration please use this article to integrate directly), ApplePay, GooglePay (these methods can be used via Stripe-Checkify integration), Atome, Carnet, AmazonPay, SamsungPay, Bizum, Boleto, Japanese convenience stores, Japanese convenience stores 7-Eleven, PayBright, Pix, Titres-Restaurant, Multibanco, Convenience stores Indonesia, Virtual Accounts Indonesia, FPX Online banking Malaysia, Online banking Thailand, KakaoPay, MoMo, Napas card, TWINT, DragonPay, GrabPay, DANA, DuitNow, GCash, Givex, KNET, MB WAY, Nordic gift card via NETS, Online banking India, Open banking, PayNow, Paytm, PromptPay, Touch'n Go, Vipps, Wallets India, OXXO.

4. Supported currencies

Adyen currently supports about 144 currencies. You can charge customers in one of them. The full list is available in their technical documentation on their website.

If the default currency of your Shopify store is not one of them, Adyen integration will not work.

In other words, the currency of the checkout should be in one of those currencies. This is not a limitation for your buyers, whose cards may be in any other currency, even those outside the list of supported ones.

5. Resolving common issues

🙀 Adyen is connected properly. There is nothing in my "Payment methods" block on your checkout

If you open browser's console at the checkout page and see responses (errors in red) like this Access to fetch at ‘…’ has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: … Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED, please do the following:

Add allowed origin (your store's domain) manually to your Adyen account.

Visit Developers > API credentials, the section where you got your API credential. Scroll down this page to reach “Add allowed origins” (domains) field (bellow Client Key).

See the screenshot below:

🙀 Payment pending status is for too long and it is not changing.

In case the statuses of completed orders remain pending, please visit Adyen admin and check Webhook event logs. If you encounter some failed statuses, press "Retry" as shown in the screenshot.

This operation is generally automated and there is very low probability that such manual actions may be required. But still, it is good to know and to check.

🙀 My Adyen account is used elsewhere, would it be a problem?

It is a pretty common situation when an Adyen account is used in various places / businesses. We recommend to create a separate merchant account. Add "checkify" to its name in Adyen in order to see transactions only related to our checkout. Otherwise, there is a risk of accumulating a mixture of transactions. When exploring webhooks you will also encounter a mix of those related and unrelated to Checkify's operation.

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