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Cancel Payments

There may be scenarios in which you need to cancel a payment, such as an authorized payment that had a fraud decision of review or a customer placed a payment by mistake and you need to cancel it before it is settled.

PublicSquare API offers the ability to cancel a payment before it is settled or captured.

Getting Started​

To get started, you will need a PublicSquare Account.

Get your Secret Key​

Next you will need your Secret Key. Go to your Developers section and click Reveal for your Secret Key and copy the value.

Save the Secret Key as it will be used in the next steps of this guide.

Cancel the Payment​

In order to cancel a payment, we will need the ID of an authorized or recently captured payment. Assuming you have a payment similar to:

Authorized Payment
{
  "id": "pmt_2YKewBonG4tgk12MheY3PiHDy",
  "account_id": "acc_B518niGwGYKzig6vtrRVZGGGV",
  "environment": "test",
  "status": "requires_capture",
  ...
}

We need to make a call to Cancel Payment endpoint:

Create a Payment
curl 'https://api.publicsquare.com/payments/cancel' \
-X 'POST' \
-H 'X-API-KEY: <SECRET_API_KEY>' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
  "payment_id": "pmt_2YKewBonG4tgk12MheY3PiHDy"
}'

Payment Response​

Given the above examples, you should see a cancelled payment result similar to:

{
  "id": "pmt_2YKewBonG4tgk12MheY3PiHDy",
  "account_id": "acc_B518niGwGYKzig6vtrRVZGGGV",
  "environment": "test",
  "status": "cancelled",
  "transaction_id": "trx_95rvMJvAVeG68W4NtLdfkN3LG",
  "amount": 1000,
  "amount_capturable": 0,
  "amount_charged": 1000,
  "amount_refunded": 0,
  "refunded": false,
  ...
  "transaction": {
    "id": "trx_95rvMJvAVeG68W4NtLdfkN3LG",
    "account_id": "acc_B518niGwGYKzig6vtrRVZGGGV",
    "environment": "test",
    "status": "cancelled",
    "amount": 1000,
    "fee_amount": 0,
    "net_amount": 1000,
    ...
  },
  ...
}

Handling Cancellation Failures​

If a payment cannot be cancelled because the payment has already been settled, an error response will be returned:

{
  "title": "Error",
  "status": 400,
  "detail": "payment cancellation failed."
}

If payment cancellation fails, you can follow the refund payment guide.

Conclusion​

This guide showed you how to cancel a payment. You can also follow our refund payment guide which will attempt to cancel the payment and fallback to issuing a refund.

Follow these guides to learn more: