Rapyd held a 24-hour internal hackathon last July to compete and build on ideas using the Rapyd API. One of our winning teams helped build and present a WhatsApp payment application for businesses to communicate with their customers while allowing customers to make an order and accept payments right within the chat. The team included Rapyd’s very own Borgar Erlendsson, Sveinbjörn Geirsson, Raúl Santiago Gómez, and Charles Dorsett.
A few of the use cases could include:
- Order and pay for a meal using a prefunded Rapyd Wallet.
- Send pre-purchased orders to friends through a wallet-to-wallet transfer.
- As an alternative, a Hosted Checkout Page can be generated.
Pycharm with Python was used to build the project using the Rapyd API and the WhatsApp API. A business account is needed to do this and the team used 360dialog.com as a third party provider. “Python was great. Simple syntax. Excellent for prototyping.” says Sveinbjörn.
Sveinbjörn shared that the team worked through setting up the request signature header parameter, handling the endpoint for the webhooks to return, and walking through the flow of payments. Sveinbjörn himself focused on part of the payment sessions, ordering for a cafe or restaurant, and pairing the communication and payment correctly in WhatsApp.
Raúl said although they were only able to commit 24 hours to this project, future features to implement would be group payments, split payments, subscriptions or even authorizing a specific list of payments between family users.
