How to Accept Credit Card Payments in Kinetic Request

by Kelly Heikkila

Registration for Kinetic Data’s annual user conference, the Kinetic Enthusiasts Group (KEG), opened last week.  This year we wanted to make the registration process as seamless as possible.  Our outstanding hotel venue, The Depot Renaissance, offered a great landing page just for us booking the hotel for our event.  We also wanted to accept credit cards right within the form, versus emailing out an invoice as we had done in the past.  Enter Kinetic Request, Kinetic Task and Stripe credit card checkout service.

Adding Stripe checkout into a form is a fairly quick three-step process:

1. Get an account from Stripe:  They will require some banking information, along with a (reasonable) fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.  Funds get transferred from Stripe within a couple of days after a person purchases something from you.  They also have a great subscription service for recurring payments.
2. Add some Javascript to your Kinetic Request form:  This javascript gets added to in via the “custom header content” field on your form (Advanced Tab) and passes values from the form (email, price, etc.) to a Stripe popup.  The javascript also then submits the form automatically after the credit card details are validated by Stripe.
3. Submit the charge to Stripe: Once the form is submitted to Kinetic Request, it passes the values retrieved to Kinetic Task, where a task tree is waiting.  A Stripe handler/node in this tree then passes the charge over to Stripe along with your private credentials, which returns a charge ID from Stripe that can be used for auditing/troubleshooting.

Note that in this process you never store any credit card details.  Stripe simply gives you a token in the javascript that represents the credit card information and that token is passed along on the back-end with other charge details to complete the loop. It’s both user-friendly and secure.  And that’s it!  You’re ready to start accepting credit card payments.

Solutions like this to what were once (not that long ago) very difficult problems are why I love web development today.  Instead of worrying about how you’re going to securely store and charge someone’s credit card, you can focus on other aspects of your business that really add value to your customer.  This is doubly true with Kinetic Request and Kinetic Task.  Our platform was designed to plug in both cloud-based and internal services seamlessly with very little code.  Organizations now have the power to create rich, consumer-like, intuitive experiences for both internal and external stakeholders.

For more info

• Kinetic Community Solutions  with Sample Code: http://community.kineticdata.com/20_Kinetic_Task/Solutions/Accepting_Credit_Card_Payments_with_Stripe
• Kinetic Community Stripe Task Handler: http://community.kineticdata.com/20_Kinetic_Task/Task_Handlers/Stripe/Stripe_Complete_Checkout
• Stripe’s checkout process documentation:  https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/checkout
• Signup for KEG today: http://keg.kineticdata.com