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Receive Online Payments with Checkout API

Did you know FreshBooks now offers Checkout Links? Now it’s even easier to receive payments from your customers.

Checkout Links allow you to create unique payment links to collect online payments without needing to make an Invoice first. Post Checkout Links on your website, social media, or anywhere online to let your customers click and pay for items or services at a fixed price with their credit card or bank account. Most importantly, our Checkout Links are PCI-DSS compliant!

Typical Use Cases

  • You have a website and want to receive payments directly from a webpage, without the hassle of sending an Invoice to each of your customers
  • You have a client who isn’t great at keeping on top of outstanding invoices. Instead of re-sending them, you can simply text your client a checkout link!
  • You have a social media page where you want to accept payments, but you can’t add every customer as a Client. No problem! Include a Checkout Link in your bio
  1. Get Authenticated
  2. Create an Item or a Service
  3. Call the Checkout Link Endpoint
  4. Enable a Payment Processor on the Checkout Link
  5. Render the Checkout Link on your website or preferred media

Before you begin, you’ll need:

  1. Access to our Postman Collection
  2. To authenticate all your requests by following this simple guide
  3. To enable FreshBooks Payments or Stripe Payments (refer to Enabling Online Payments On An Invoice)
  4. Somewhere to place your Checkout Link (like a webpage or social media account)

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Get Authenticated!

Not sure how to authenticate your requests? No problem, simply refer to the tutorial on Authenticating With OAuth 2.0.

Already authenticated? Great. Note the Bearer token; you’ll need it in Steps 2 & 3.

Step 2: Create an Item or a Service

This is the item or service being paid for by your clients. These items or services can be tangible or intangible. Note the item_id from the Create Item response, you’ll need it when creating the Checkout Link.

You can check out the full API specification on how to create an item here.

Send an authenticated POST request to the endpoint, passing in the item_id from Step 2.

You can check out the API specification of how to create a Checkout Link here.

Now we’ll enable our preferred Payment Processor on the Checkout Link by making a POST to the payment options endpoint. Pass the id from Step 3 as entity_id.

To determine the value for gateway_name, reference this tutorial. It’s typically either fbpay or stripe.

Concatenate the id (or entity_id) to the base URL https://my.freshbooks.com/#/checkout.

Example: https://my.freshbooks.com/#/checkout/7d9a75ffa8414638ab646ee1acd7f033

Step 6: Start Receiving Payments on Your Website!

Still have questions? Something isn’t working right? Don’t hesitate to reach out to api@freshbooks.com.

We’ll respond to your request as quickly as we can!

FreshBooks