Software providers need a way to generate revenue from the transactions that flow through their platform without distracting from their primary mission — designing and building great software.
NMI Payments exists to make that balance a reality. One of the ways we accomplish that is with our developer portal, which simplifies payments integration by allowing developers to experiment with checkout flows and access in-depth documentation all within an interactive format.
We’re excited to announce a new resource added to our developer portal: the Design Toolkit for Developers. This new set of visual process flow guides pushes the Developer Portal beyond just a knowledge base to transform it into a more complete, interactive toolset that makes integrating payments faster, easier and more intuitive.
But what is the NMI Developer Portal? And how does it simplify embedded payments for developers?
NMI’s Developer Portal — A Fully Customizable Payments Experience
Our payment solutions are designed with flexibility in mind, whether you’re using a fully hosted, no-code solution or a self-hosted custom checkout, we have the tools to fit your needs.
For our partners who want to roll up their sleeves and build custom payment flows, we offer the NMI Developer Portal — home to all the guides, software development kits (SDKs) and application program interface (API) references necessary to design the perfect payment experience.
The Developer Portal is a wealth of knowledge, complete with:
- Quick start guides
- Comprehensive API and SDK documentation
- Interactive coding tools
- Detailed resources for online, in-person and software-based payments
It offers plug-and-play, low-code/no-code tools in a dynamic format, allowing you to refine your checkout integrations before going live.
Design Toolkit — A Paint-by-Numbers Approach to Development
One consistent piece of feedback we’ve seen from senior engineers and tech leads is the need for more visual resources — ways to dig into an API or SDK’s capabilities faster without having to pore over pages of text.
To make our documentation more robust and accessible for our users, we’re excited to offer our first iteration of the NMI Design Toolkit for Developers — a visual-first road map designed to make building a great checkout and payment flow a “paint-by-numbers” experience.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
The Design Toolkit describes our API and SDK documentation in a more visual format so you can get a feel for the key components of each flow and begin visualizing how a checkout solution might look on your own platform. For visual learners, it’s a faster and more intuitive way of conceptualizing checkout flows than by relying on text alone.
Each flow covers the most important high-level information, including:
- Best practices
- Design components
- API requirements
- Compliance requirements
The first of these visual flow guides is already live, covering the online checkout flow, and we have several more planned for the future.
A Customizable Visual Pattern Library Makes Imagining Possibilities Easy
We built this toolkit in Figma to provide a starter UI pattern library that development and design teams can then customize for their own software needs. We built out common payment UI patterns and even page layouts as component sets with variants and properties. This makes it easy to customize the examples to your software needs and visualize what the experience could look like.
With the example checkout page layout, you can toggle on and off UI pattern variants for features like shipping, recommended products, express checkout and promo codes. You can also customize typography, colors and more at the main component level and the changes will cascade across all pages in the flows. Being directly in the Figma file also allows developers to leverage Figma’s Dev Mode and streamline building these components in code.
These tools can jumpstart designing your payment experience with best practices and help you more quickly visualize how the user experience will flow for your customers. This enables you to focus on getting your product to market faster with confidence.
The Goals for Our New Visual Design Toolkit
The goal of the new Design Toolkit for Developers is to make things easier for our partners in four key areas:
1) Make It Easier for Developers To Integrate Payments
We believe payments should be simple. This toolkit helps you integrate payments quickly and effectively, so you can start monetizing transactions sooner.
2) Make It Easier for Developers To Visualize Their Solution
Our new visual tools are designed to help you visualize what’s possible with NMI Payments, ensuring you fully understand the available functionality so you can unlock the platform’s full potential.
3) Make It Easier for Developers To Evaluate APIs & SDKs
Choosing a payments partner is no trivial task, and making the right (or wrong) choice can have lasting impacts. The Design Toolkit speeds up the evaluation process by giving you a clear picture of our capabilities so you can quickly decide if we’re the right fit.
4) Make It Easier for Developers To Get Payments to Market Quickly
You can’t start earning residuals until your payment services are live. By streamlining the development process, the Design Toolkit speeds up the entire process, from initial evaluation through final execution, so you can launch faster and start earning sooner.
Embedded Payments Solutions Customized To Meet Your Needs
The first flows in the Design Toolkit for Developers are already rolling out, making payments more accessible, visual, and developer-friendly for software providers and tech-savvy payment providers alike. But the checkout flow is just the first of many that will be released over the following year. Soon, you’ll be able to take a visual-first approach to learning and testing all the key components of the NMI developer toolset, so stay tuned.
We are experimenting with different ways to make our documentation more helpful and this is just our first iteration of the Design Toolkit. If you’d like more information on how to use the new visual toolkit or to give us feedback on how we can make these resources more helpful, we’d love to hear from you. Don’t hesitate to reach out to a member of our team today.
Don’t just turn on payments, transform the way you do business
- Generate New Revenue By adding or expanding payment offerings to your solution, you can start earning higher monthly and transaction-based recurring revenue.
- Offer the Power of Choice Allow merchants to choose from 125+ shopping cart integrations and 200+ processor options to streamline their onboarding.
- Seamless White Labeling Make the platform an extension of your brand by adding your logo, colors and customizing your URL.