Vendor links

A vendor link is your own account at a reseller site, connected to Routegate with your key. Routegate sends a sale to it when your lines cannot take it, or only to it if you choose, and the sale comes back through the same API, the same webhooks and the same wallet as any other.

Vendor links serve live sales only. In test mode every sale goes to the built-in mock, so you can build against vendor-only plans and bills without a vendor.

Connect a vendor

In the dashboard, open Vendor links and choose Connect. Pick the vendor, give your site's address and your API key, and Routegate checks the key with one balance read before it saves anything. The key is sealed at rest and never shown again; only its last four characters are. Some vendor sites ask you to allow Routegate's server address first, and the dashboard says so when you connect.

Then load the vendor's plans. Routegate reads the site's own list where the site has one and keeps each plan's code, size, validity and price as the site gives them. A plan you add by hand is yours to edit in full.

Connecting and changing vendors needs the vendors.manage permission.

Supply order

The supply order says where a network's sales go. Set it for the business and override it per network:

Lines always come before vendors when both are on. Routegate Reserve has its own switch per network.

Fallback order per plan

Each of Routegate's plans can have a fallback order of up to five of your vendor plans, one per vendor, tried in the order you set after your lines. The dashboard suggests vendor plans of the same size and validity first, and warns when one differs.

A vendor that answers with a temporary failure passes the sale to the next step. An unclear answer is never retried elsewhere: Routegate asks that vendor for the status until it knows, so a sale is never sent twice.

What a vendor sale costs

Routegate charges the plan's charges, the same as when one of your lines serves it. You pay the vendor its own price at its own site, from your balance there. Routegate never moves money to a vendor for you.

Vendor-only plans

A vendor-only plan is a plan of your own, built from your vendor plans and sold only through your vendors, never a line. Use one for a bundle Routegate's catalogue does not list.

• Its code is vendor: followed by 1 to 40 lower-case letters, digits and hyphens, for example vendor:mtn-500mb-weekly. It can never be mistaken for one of Routegate's plans.
• Send that code as product_code on the vend route for its service. List vendor-only plans gives your key the active ones.
• Airtime takes any whole naira amount from 50 to 50,000, and electricity from 1,000 to 500,000. Data and cable deliver the vendor plan as it is.
• Routegate's fee on a vendor-only sale is a percentage of the vendor plan's price, with a minimum and a maximum, per network or biller and service. The dashboard's Pricing page shows each one. A live sale on a pair with no fee set is refused with 400 on product_code. Test sales are free.
• The sale comes back sold_as vendor_only, with vendor_only_plan naming the plan as it was when sold. See sold as and channel.

Bills

Cable TV and electricity go through your vendor links. Lines never sell bills, so in live mode a bill is sold by the plan's fallback order of your bill vendor plans, and fails with ROUTING_NO_CANDIDATES when it has no usable step.

• Verify a bill account asks your own vendors first, each one that sells the service, oldest first, and answers with the first that knows the account. A vendor that clearly refuses the account ends the check with a 400; the next vendor is tried only after a temporary failure.
• The meter type and the customer's phone go with every payment. A vendor that needs the phone refuses a sale without it, and the next vendor is tried.
• The token, units or receipt number the vendor answers are kept on the transaction's metadata for the customer's receipt.

On the transaction

A sale a vendor served has channel vendor, vendor_account_id set to the vendor link, and metadata.vendor_code holding the code it was sent as. metadata.route says how it was routed when it was accepted: line, lines_then_vendors, vendor or provider.

Routegate Reserve

Routegate Reserve is Routegate's own pool of lines. Per network, a business chooses whether the Reserve is off (the default), a fallback after its own lines, or first. When the Reserve may serve a sale, its price for the plan is held with the plan's charges and taken only if a Reserve line delivers it; otherwise it is released. A sale the Reserve served comes back with channel stock. Test mode never uses it.