How to connect PhonePe to your ecommerce website

Step 1 — Get a PhonePe Business account approved

Before any of this, you need a PhonePe Business account with the Payment Gateway product enabled. Signing up is free at business.phonepe.com. They will ask for your business details, PAN, and a bank account to settle into.

Approval is PhonePe's decision, not something a website builder can speed up, and it can take a few days. Two practical notes while you wait:

• • You do not have to sit idle. Cash on delivery and WhatsApp checkout need no gateway at all, so a store can be live and taking orders while the application is in review.
• • Apply to more than one. Gateways decline plenty of genuine small sellers, and they do not decline the same ones. Cashfree and Razorpay are worth applying to in parallel — you can connect whichever approves you, and there is no cost to having two.

Step 2 — Find your API keys (and avoid the v1 trap)

This is where most integrations die, so it is worth being precise. PhonePe has issued two different kinds of credential over the years, and they are not interchangeable.

To get the current set:

1. Sign in at business.phonepe.com with the account that should receive the money.
2. Open Developer Settings in the left-hand menu.
3. Go to the API Keys tab.
4. Copy the Client ID, reveal and copy the Client Secret, and note the Client Version — usually just 1.

Step 3 — Connect it to your store

What happens next depends entirely on how your store was built. There are three realistic paths.

If you built the site yourself

You are writing five pieces, and the fifth is the one people skip:

1. Exchange your Client ID, Secret and Version for an OAuth access token. Cache it — it lasts a while, and minting one per payment will get you rate-limited.
2. Create the payment server-side, with the amount in paise and a merchant order reference that is unique forever on your account. PhonePe returns a redirect URL.
3. Send the customer to that URL.
4. When they come back, call the order-status API and confirm only if it says COMPLETED. Never trust the return URL itself — the customer can edit it.
5. Handle the webhook, for the customer who pays and never comes back.

Two details that cause real money bugs. Amounts are in paise, so ₹499.50 is 49950 — sending 499.5 charges someone ₹4.99. And a merchant order reference cannot be reused, so a customer whose first attempt fails cannot be sent back under the same one; you need a per-attempt reference that still maps back to the order.

If you are on a plugin-based platform

Install the PhonePe plugin for your platform, paste the same three values into its settings, and check which API version the plugin targets before you trust it. A plugin still on v1 will ask you for a Salt Key — which tells you it has not been updated for the current API.

If you are on a builder that supports it

Paste the three values, tick a box. On SitesPlaced, PhonePe lives under Settings → Payments & invoices: paste the Client ID, Secret and Version, and the credentials are checked against PhonePe before anything is saved — so a wrong key fails there rather than at a customer's checkout. The amount conversion, the unique-reference handling and the server-side status check are already done.

Step 4 — Set up the webhook (do not skip this)

Here is the scenario that costs people orders. A customer pays on PhonePe. Their phone switches from wifi to mobile data, or they hit home, or the redirect stalls. The money has moved. Your store never hears about it. The order sits pending, you do not get an email, and the customer is now messaging you asking where their thing is.

The webhook is what closes that gap. PhonePe calls your store directly, independently of the customer's browser.

1. In PhonePe Business, open Developer Settings → Webhooks and click Create Webhook.
2. Paste the webhook URL your store gives you.
3. Choose SHA-256 as the authentication type and set a username and password.
4. Subscribe to checkout.order.completed and checkout.order.failed.

Step 5 — Test it properly

Place a real order on your own store for the smallest amount you can, and refund yourself afterwards from the PhonePe dashboard. Check three things, not one:

• • The order shows as paid, with the PhonePe transaction ID recorded against it.
• • The amount on the order matches the amount in your PhonePe dashboard exactly.
• • Close the tab on PhonePe's page right after paying. This is the only way to prove the webhook works, and it is the test everyone forgets.

If PhonePe gave you UAT credentials you can rehearse all of this in their test environment first. UAT credentials only work against UAT, and no real money moves — just remember to switch back to production keys before you start selling, or you will take orders that never settle.

The errors you are most likely to hit

If you do not have the website yet

Everything above assumes you already have an ecommerce site to connect PhonePe to. If you are still at the stage of selling over Instagram DMs and WhatsApp, the gateway is the easy half — the store is the part worth getting right first.

A SitesPlaced store is free to build and publish, and PhonePe, Cashfree and Razorpay are all on the free plan with 0% commission — the gateway's own fee is the only cut anyone takes. You can import an existing catalogue from Instagram or a PDF rather than typing products in one by one, publish, and connect the gateway the day your account is approved.

The step-by-step version of the PhonePe setup, with the exact dashboard paths: connect PhonePe.

Frequently asked questions