Setting Up PayFast (South Africa) As Your Payment Gateway
For Brilliant Directories users in South Africa, PayFast is our recommended payment gateway solution.
To setup PayFast as your payment gateway, you need the Merchant ID and Merchant Key found in your PayFast account. For the most recent information about where to find these credentials, please see the PayFast Documentation on this topic.
Accepting Credit Cards
PayFast accounts can accept both international and domestic Visa and Mastercards. However, in order for your PayFast account to accept credit cards, it is required to be verified by PayFast first.
Issuing Refunds
There is no automatic / programmatic method for issuing refunds through your PayFast account. As explained in the PayFast documentation, the only way to initiate a refund is to contact their support team and request a refund be made.
IMPORTANT NOTE: In the Admin area of your Brilliant Directories website, you will see an option to refund payments that have been collected from members. If PayFast is your payment gateway, this option in the Brilliant Directories Admin area will only mark the transaction as refunded for internal reporting purposes only, and will not initiate an actual refund.
When refunding a customer, we recommend first refunding the payment through PayFast, and then once the refund is confirmed, marking the invoice as refunded using the Refund option in the Brilliant Directories Admin area. This way, you will have a reference that the payment was refunded.
Minimum & Maximum Transaction Amounts
The minimum and maximum amount you are able to process through a single PayFast transaction varies by account (navigate to Settings >> Payment Methods in your PayFast account for details about your account).
At the time of writing this article, for accounts that have been recently launched and verified, Credit Card, EFT, Debit Card, and Masterpass payments require a minimum transaction of R 5.00, and can be up to a maximum of R 10,000.00 per transaction. Other payment methods vary slightly.
When performing tests or setting the prices on your website, please keep your PayFast account's limitations in mind to avoid processing errors.
Making Test Transactions Using the PayFast Sandbox
Before starting to process live transactions, you may wish to process some test transactions first. To do this, first navigate to the PayFast sandbox and login with your PayFast email address: https://sandbox.payfast.co.za
Once logged in, you will be presented with the Merchant ID, Merchant Key, Buyer Email, and Buyer Pass to use for testing. Take note of these, as they will be used in the following steps.
Next, choose PayFast as your payment gateway in your Brilliant Directories Admin by navigating to Finance >> Payment Settings and selecting PayFast.
You will then be presented with fields to enter your PayFast credentials. Enter the Merchant ID and Merchant Key obtained when logging in to the PayFast sandbox and set "Enable Test Mode" to "Yes":
After saving these credentials, you are ready to perform a test payment.
To complete a test payment, sign up for an account on your website as a normal member would and you should be sent to PayFast and logged in to a test account automatically (if you are not logged in to the test account automatically, you can use the "Buyer Email" and "Buyer Pass" noted above from your PayFast sandbox account to login). After completing the test on PayFast you should be redirected automatically back to your website and shown a success message.
Once your testing is completed successfully and you are ready to accept live payments, please be sure to update the Merchant ID and Merchant Key to your live credentials (not the sandbox credentials), and set "Enable Test Mode?" to "No".
