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Recommendations for reference and orderId

The reference (also called orderId) must be unique for the sales unit Merchant Serial Number (MSN) (i.e., the ID of the sales unit). The reference does not need to be globally unique, so several MSNs may use the same reference, as long as it is unique for each sales unit.

The reference is case-sensitive. We strongly recommend using a format like acme-shop-123-order123abc, instead of just 123456.

Please note: Having very short orderIds, with just a few digits, can cause internal processing in the Vipps systems to be slower, and this can cause problems, such as timeouts. Use the recommended format to avoid problems.

This is applicable to:

Use user-friendly orderIds​

If you ever have a problem that requires us to search in our logs, we need a reference that is unique enough to actually find. A reference that contains only digits may not be possible to find, and then we are not able to help.

It is possible to use UUID, of the format 123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000, but remember that reference is shown to the user in Vipps. We recommend a more user-friendly format, like acme-shop-123-order123abc.

The maximum length of a reference is 50 alphanumeric characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and - (hyphen). Leading zeros should be avoided, as some applications (e.g., Excel) tend to remove them, and this may cause misunderstandings.

See also: Recommendations for paymentDescription and transactionText.

Multiple sales units​

If you have multiple sales units, prefixing the reference with the MSN for each sales unit is recommended. For example, if the MSN is 654321, the reference could be 654321-acme-shop-123-order123abc.

Multiple attempts​

If you need to make multiple attempts at paying the "same" order, you can add a suffix to the orderId to make it unique on the Vipps side.

For example, if your internal orderId is acme-shop-123-order123abc, you can add -1 to get a unique Vipps orderId acme-shop-123-order123abc-1 for the first attempt, acme-shop-123-order123abc-2 for the second, etc.

This is useful when a customer does the following:

  1. Adds a product to the cart.
  2. Goes to the payment page and selects Vipps.
  3. Gets the payment request in Vipps but cancels (or does nothing).
  4. Adds another product to the same cart (or order).
  5. Repeat steps 2 and 3.

If you use a suffix, you will still be able to search for the main part of the orderId on portal.vipps.no, like acme-shop-123-order123abc, without the suffix, and still get find the orderId acme-shop-123-order123abc-1.