Choosing an approach

There are two ways to add Shuttle payments to your platform. Which one fits comes down to one question: do you create your merchants’ payment accounts, or do your merchants already have their own?

Embed Shuttle in your product

You create each merchant’s account, through the API, and Shuttle sits inside your product under your brand. Merchants set up their payment provider, take payments and manage them in your screens, using components you embed. Shuttle can be fully white-labelled: you can replace Shuttle’s terms with your own, and hide the marketplace panel. See Merchant Setup options.

This is Embedded Payments for Platforms, Shuttle’s main product. You manage the billing relationship with Shuttle for your merchants. You authenticate with your platform’s API key, which reaches every merchant you have created.

Connect to your merchants’ Payment Links accounts

Your merchants have their own account, on Shuttle Payment Links: they sign up themselves, connect their payment provider and set up their branding there. Your platform connects to their account, with their permission, and creates payment links and takes payments through it. The merchant manages their own billing relationship with Shuttle.

The connection uses account sharing: Shuttle Payment Links shares its merchants’ accounts with platforms like yours. You can build it yourself against the API, or connect with no code through Zapier, Make or Cyclr. See Connect to Payment Links accounts.

Side by side

	Embed Shuttle	Connect to Payment Links accounts
Who creates the merchant’s account	You, through the API	The merchant, on Shuttle Payment Links
Billing	You manage the billing relationship with Shuttle	The merchant manages their own, for their Payment Links account
How you authenticate	Your API key	Account sharing (OAuth), one connection per merchant
What merchants see	Your product only	Shuttle Payment Links for their own setup
Branding	Fully yours	The merchant’s own, on Shuttle-hosted pages
Customer payment experience	Embedded in your product	A Shuttle-hosted checkout or payment link
What you build	The API, the embedded components and webhooks	API calls to create links, plus webhooks; or nothing, with a workflow tool
Before you go live	Your own testing, and your merchants’ payment provider accounts	Against the API, Shuttle certifies your integration first; with a workflow tool, setting up each merchant takes 1-2 hours

Whichever you choose, how the customer enters their card (a hosted page, an iframe, or your own systems) decides how much of PCI DSS falls to you: see Your PCI DSS obligations.

If you start by connecting to Payment Links accounts and later want payments inside your own product, you can move to embedding: the API is the same, so much of what you built carries over. Your merchants’ Payment Links accounts, with their saved cards and payment history, stay where they are.