An order represents a payment obligation in the PayNearMe platform. An order could be a monthly car payment, a required fine for a citation, or a deposit to an online gaming account. Most clients use an SFTP bulk file to upload their orders en masse; however, orders can also be individually created in the API. When creating orders, you only need to define an amount for the order (i.e., order_amount), the customer (i.e., site_customer_identifier or site_order_identifier), the type of order, and whether the order is standing.

Orders come in three varieties: any, exact, and up-to. For any orders, consumers can pay any amount towards the balance. Clients who create exact orders require their consumers to pay the exact order amount as defined in the order_amount parameter. For up-to orders, consumers can pay any amount up to the defined order_amount. You can also throw in a minimum_payment_amount or even delinquency fees using custom parameters just to keep your consumers on their toes.

The "standing" of an order depends on how you want to maintain your orders each month. Think of non-standing orders as one-time transactions, such as a rent payments or payments for a service. Non-standing orders are not common. Standing orders have a balance that reduces over a series of transactions--like payments for a car loan. For gaming integrations, standing orders work like accounts where consumers can repeatedly add or subtract funds to/from their balance.

While orders represent payments, push_orders represent disbursements, or payments that clients make to consumers. Push orders are structured similarly to orders, but they require the identity validation of the consumer or the user, to ensure the correct person is receiving funds. For more information about push orders, see the /create_push_order endpoint.