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Recommendations for orderId/reference

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

The orderId is case-sensitive. We strongly recommend to use 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 an orderId that is "unique enough" to actually find. An orderId 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 orderId is shown to the user in Vipps. We recommend a more user-friendly format, like acme-shop-123-order123abc.

The maximum length of an orderId 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.

Multiple sales units​

If you have multiple sales units, prefixing the orderId with the MSN for each sales unit is recommended. For example, if the MSN is 654321, the orderId 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. Repeats 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.