What is the flow when the call to create a Balanced merchant account returns a non-success code?

Question

Is a redirect code returned to the client with a URI that the client needs to be redirected to? Once the user completes additional verification on the Balanced website, how are the results transmitted back to the server? Is it a configurable redirect uri?

Answer 1

Balanced will return you a 300 status code when it fails to identify a merchant. You can resubmit the request with additional information or you can redirect the merchant to the location supplied in the response and Balanced will attempt to gather more information and verify them.

When you redirect the user you must include a redirect_uri paramater which the merchant will be returned to at the end of the identification process.

You can also pass through information in the querystring so that the form is pre-filled for the user. These fields should be the same as you included in the original JSON payload, for a nested dictionary you enclose the field in square brackets. E.g.

{
    "name": "Joel Spolskey",
    "bank_account": {
        "bank_code": 321174851
    }
}

Should become

?name=Joel%20Spolskey&bank_account[bank_code]=321174851

Once Balanced has verified the Merchant, the user is redirected back to redirect_uri, along with the Merchant's email address and a new parameter called merchant_uri as an identifier. You would then POST the email_address and merchant_uri parameters to the account endpoint and it will create the account for you. If the user cancels out of the verification process they are redirected to the redirect_uri but doing a POST on the account endpoint will return the original 300 redirect since they do not have any identifying information in the system.