Getting started

What is Marketplace?

Marketplace is a cloud-based platform that allows for the digital distribution of market-specific digital commodity products such as Airtime, Data, Prepaid Electricity, and other Bill Payments. This can be either through our secure Distribution APIs or Chat Templates.

Integrated with a variety of digital product providers, the Marketplace platform enables you to expand and manage your product offering through providers like major mobile network operators, pre-paid electricity providers, and paid television providers. Marketplace supports your electronic transaction channels such as mobile banking apps, online/internet banking, USSD, Chat Banking (including WhatsApp), POS devices, and any electronic checkout point.

Marketplace also provides a host of complementary features such as Analytics, Transaction Success Management, and Support Tools to help minimize your operational costs. These features include:

• Distribution of Digital Products: Clickatell has partnered with leading digital product providers to make a suite of high-demand (catalyst) products available to increase the ‘foot traffic’ to your chat channels. These products are available via either our Distribution APIs or ‘Chat Templates’ (Clickatell’s optimized digital product purchase chat experiences built to maximize adoption and sales).
•  Transaction Success Management: A suite of services such as automated retries and merchant-specific error handling ensures that your transaction executes successfully under extremely high-traffic conditions and can recover from merchant/payment-provider downtimes. This also includes:
  • Velocity checks that allow you to set transaction limits to help reduce fraud
  • In-flight transaction checks that automatically flag duplicate transactions to prevent unwanted purchases and refund requests
  • Automated queueing and retries that increase the number of transactions processed
• Easy and seamless integration via APIs using globally accepted standards
• Reporting and Analytics which provides a view of all your Marketplace transactions across all Vendors, Products, and Channels. It enables you to monitor and gain insights into the usage and performance of all your products vended through the Marketplace platform.
• Superior customer support and performance monitoring provided 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

Integrating with Chat Flow

To enable chat commerce via chat channels such as USSD and WhatsApp, you can also use Marketplace in combination with our Chat Flow product. This self-service product allows you to manage your products, services, and workflows and effect any changes in minutes across all your channels without the need for a developer or other technical resource.

To find out more about what our Chat Flow offering can offer you, please contact our support team.

Getting started with Marketplace

Below is a high-level overview of the steps required for you to be onboarded onto the Marketplace platform. You will be guided and assisted throughout the whole process.

Step 1: Contact Clickatell Sales team

Contact the Clickatell Sales team to express your interest in our Marketplace product. They will gather information about your specific needs and then proceed with sending you a proposal and other required documents such as a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and a master service agreement (MSA). Once the proposal and other required documents are signed off, the Sales team will create a scoping document based on your requirements to assess whether your requirements can be met.

Step 2: Necessary APIs shared with client

Based on your requirements, all relevant APIs will be shared with you.

Step 3: Kick-off meeting

Our Sales team and Client Activation Management (CAM) team will set up a project kick-off meeting with you to discuss timelines and other requirements.

Step 4: Set up VPN

Our network teams will work with you to set up the VPN for both UAT (testing) and production (live) environments if required.

Step 5: Account setup (Clickatell)

Clickatell does all the necessary setup and configurations on our side to activate you as a client on our Transact platform. No action is required from your side unless specifically requested.

Once the configuration has been completed the following UAT information will be shared with you:

• ClientID
• Secret
• API Key
• UAT URLs (URLs are found in API document) 

Step 6: Client signs off on UAT

After you’ve tested your setup on the UAT environment, UAT sign-off is required before it can be promoted to production. Once sign-off is received, Clickatell schedules a business readiness meeting with you.

Step 7: Deploy to production

Clickatell will promote the setup to production (live environment).

Once the production configuration has been completed, the following production information will be shared with you:

• ClientID
• Secret
• API Key
• Production URLs

Please contact support or your account manager if you have any questions or require more detail about this process.