Add payments

As part of the Actions Center's Appointments End-to-End integration, you can opt in your merchants to receive payment from users when they make a booking, appointment, or reservation. Google works with payment processors to set up tokenization. Payment processors then use unique tokens to securely pay merchants.

For payment-secured bookings, we render a Payment Info module in the checkout flow. This allows the user to enter their credit card information.

Support for 3DS1 and 3DS2 is available, please refer to this tutorial on the implementation.

Eligibility

For your merchants to receive payments through the Actions Center, you must meet the following requirements:

  1. Use a supported payment processor. The latest list of supported processors can be found on the Google Pay website.
  2. Accept tokenized payments in accordance with your processor.
  3. Complete the identity and business business verification process outlined here.
  4. Payment cannot be enabled for bookings that requires asynchronous confirmation .

Changes to feeds and booking server for payments

Payments are done through an opt-in process at the merchant level. You must enable payments for any merchant who needs to receive payment for any of their services. To enable payments, changes must be made to the feeds and to the booking server.

Feeds

  • Merchant Feed: Specify payment information through the tokenization_parameter set in the tokenization_config field. The set is dependent on the payment processor chosen. The set is the same set of paymentMethodTokenizationParameters.parameters that would be passed to Google Pay if you were to integrate with it.
  • Services/Availability Feeds: Specify payment requirements based on your appropriate use case. For more details, see Use cases for payments.

Booking Server

Use cases for payments

When deciding whether to take payments for each of these use cases, please review our Payments Policies and ensure that you are able to comply with all relevant policies.

There are the use cases for payments:

For more information on how to implement each of these use cases see the tutorial on Configuring Payments.

Complete prepaid bookings

Figure 1 shows the flow of activities between users, you (the scheduling partner), Google, and the payment processor.

Figure 1: Prepaid bookings sequence diagram
Figure 1: Prepaid bookings sequence diagram
  • A payment must be for 100% of the service cost amount. In other words, services must be paid in full at the time of the booking.
Changes to services feeds

Deposits and no-show fees

Deposits and no-show fees are set up in similar ways. Figure 2 shows the flow of these activities between users, you (the scheduling partner), Google, and the payment processor.

Figure 2: Deposits or no-show fee bookings sequence diagram
Figure 2: Deposits or no-show fee bookings sequence diagram

Deposits and no-show fees can be used to ensure a user shows up for their booking.

  • A deposit can be charged to the user's credit card either upfront or at a later time.
  • A no-show fee can be charged to the user if they don't show up to the booking.
  • If necessary, both deposits and no-show fees can be applied together fo a booking.
  • Even if there is no payment required upfront, the booking server must respond to the CreateBooking request with a PaymentInformation containing a payment_transaction_id, which must be unique. The payment_transaction_id does not need to be provided by the payment processor, but it can instead be generated by the booking server.
Changes to services or availability feeds

Deposits and no-show fees can be specified at the Service level or at the Availability slot level for a merchant. If you specify them at the availability slot level, that overrides the service-level definitions.

  • To enable deposits, set the deposit field at the service or availability slot level.
  • To enable no-show fees, set the no_show_fee field at the service or availability slot level.
  • Set the require_credit_card field to REQUIRE_CREDIT_CARD_CONDITIONAL at the service or availability slot level.
  • (optional) Set prepayment_type to REQUIRED or OPTIONAL.

Credit card required

There may be other use cases that require a credit card at the time of booking.

  • Set the require_credit_card field to REQUIRE_CREDIT_CARD_ALWAYS at the Service level or at the Availability slot level for a merchant.

Cancellation and Refunds

Cancellations and refunds are either initiated by the partner (you) or by the user through the Actions Center. In both cases, you must respect the CancellationPolicy that was set at the Service level and communicated to the user at booking checkout.

If you do not provide CancellationPolicy, it is assumed that any cancellation within the cancellation window defined by min_advance_online_canceling that was set at the Service level is refundable. If min_advance_online_canceling is not defined it's 0 (meaning cancellable any time).

If you must disable cancellation from the Actions Center side, please discuss with your Google POC.

Changes to RTUs
  • After you provide a refund to the user, you must send an update booking RTU to change the payment status of the booking. Set update_mask to status,payment_information.prepayment_status and set payment_information.prepayment_status = PREPAYMENT_REFUNDED and status = CANCELED.
    • Use the new BookingStatus = CANCELED and PrepaymentStatus = PREPAYMENT_REFUNDED. The enum value CANCELED_AUTOMATIC_REFUND is deprecated for both Maps Booking API and gRPC templates.
Change to Booking Server