Phone Number, Validation, and Dwolla

Question

I'm integrating Dwolla into my website/app. I want to pay users from my bank account programatically for writing content on my site.

If I understand correctly, if users give me their phone number or email address, I can use the send() method and they will be able to complete the process with Dwolla.

My question is: do I need to validate the phone number users give me? Or will Dwolla do that? What format does it need to be in when I send it to Dwolla?

Also, will they be getting a text message on their phone with a link to register/log in to Dwolla? Just making sure. It'd be nice to see a walkthrough of the user experience somehow both from an email and a phone number.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Great question!

Phone numbers

Phone numbers should be provided as a string of 10 digits.

8187771234

When you supply a phone number that is invalid (due to an invalid format, it not existing, or being unreachable) this will happen:

Request: 

{
  ...
  "destinationId": "0000000000",
  "destinationType": "Phone"
}

Response:

{
    "Success": false,
    "Message": "Unexpected exception",
    "Response": null
}

As you can see, the request will fail with Success flagged to false and no funds will be sent. What probably stands out here is that the current failure message is quite unhelpful -- this is on our to do list of things to be fixed. When it's fixed, we'll add the new error messages to the Error Codes table on the documentation page.

Since I don't know how granular the error codes will be (we may just return "Invalid phone number."), you may want to handle the validation on your end if you are looking to catch specific errors such as an invalid area code or a number with 14 digits.

User Experience

The recipient will receive, via text message or email, an invitation to register a Dwolla account in order to claim their funds. Here's are examples of both:

SMS:

"You've received money from Gordon Zheng! Claim at dwolla.com/phone. Your code: 99999"

Email:

As soon as the user is finished creating and verifying their account, the funds will immediately be available. It's important that the user creates the account with the exact same phone number or email they received the payment with.