Merchant Search

Is there only API access? Is there a batch capability?

Yes, currently we only support API access for production. If you have any one-off needs, please reach out to the account team.

How does Visa store ID (VSID), Visa Merchant ID (VMID) and Visa Enterprise ID (VEID) vary for a merchant with a single location compared to a larger chain merchant?

For merchants with a single location, it would be the same. The hierarchy of VSID-VMID-VEID is mainly helpful to track merchants with multiple store locations.

Is there a cost to testing in Sandbox?

No, Sandbox is available to test free of cost. However, the data within Sandbox is dummy data. For any actual data testing, kindly reach out to the Visa team.

Please refer to the quick start guide below for more details on accessing Sandbox. 

https://developer.visa.com/pages/working-with-visa-apis/visa-developer-quick-start-guide.

Transaction Enrichment

Would Merchant Search work for Debit and Credit portfolio?

Yes, merchant search would work for all merchant transactions

I am having trouble identifying the fields from core transaction data to use in Transaction Search API, Transaction Lookup API. How can I identify the fields?

The format of your transaction data stream depends on your processor. If your processor is sharing the ISO message with you, there are standard manuals which indicate the field positions of various fields which you can use to parse the fields. If you do not have data in the ISO format, it is likely that the processor has parsed the data. You can contact your processor to get the details on individual fields. Please feel free to reach out to Visa’s team if you need help on identifying the fields

Is Visa Merchant ID (VMID) same as Acquirer assigned MID?

No, the Visa Merchant ID (VMID) is assigned by Visa’s global merchant repository and has no direct relation with the acquirer assigned MID (merchant ID).

Is Card Acceptor ID the same as Acquirer MID?

Technically, they are different even though they tend to be the same in many cases. However, what we see on transaction is Card Acceptor ID.

Can I access any transaction using Transaction Lookup API?

No, for security purposes we only allow access to transactions which are already configured for the BIN for the client. During onboarding kindly share the applicable BINs with Visa team for configuration. Post-production, if there are new BINs to be added Visa Merchant Search team must be informed too for updating BIN access.

Is there any delay in transaction availability within Transaction Lookup API?

Yes, transactions will be available to query in Transaction Lookup API only after a few seconds to couple of minutes in certain cases. Clients are expected to make Transaction Lookup API after introducing that delay and not instantly after transaction has been authorized. Please reach out to the Visa team for more exact information on the latency.

My use case needs to send cardholder notifications within a few seconds of transaction, what should we do?

We recommend using Transaction Lookup API wherever possible since it is based on transaction ID. However, if a couple of minutes delay would not work for your use case, you could use Transaction Search API

I have a use case for issuing rewards for eligible transactions at certain specific merchants (or restrict transactions at specific merchants). How do I implement that?

You can use Generic Search API to ‘onboard merchants’ to your program/process and use Transaction Enrichment APIs to identify eligible transactions. For a detailed overview, kindly reach out to Visa team

Generic Search

Is match score an indication of the quality of match?

No. Match score is only used to rank responses within a single request in case of multiple responses. For instances if request-1 has two responses with match score 85 and 35, the response with match score 85 can be considered the better match. However, for request-2, if there are two responses with a match score of 65 and 25, it does not mean that response-2 has a lower quality. In other words, the absolute value of a match score cannot be used to compare across different requests.

If a match score is not an indication of quality of response, what can we use to determine quality of a response?

For Generic Search API, you can currently use the confidence score. You can also use the field match indicators (which provides the overview of which fields matched), number of records matched (lower number of matches indicates higher confidence) and similarity scores (name, street address) to determine the confidence of matches. The status code field indicates whether there was a match.