How to Collect Payments with Atlas

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you need the following:

• A verified Atlas account. If you don't have one, you can sign up for free and follow this guide to verify your Atlas account.
• An Atlas API Key. You can fetch your API Key from your Atlas dashboard .
• Configured and setup webhooks on Atlas. See our guide on Configuring and Verifying Atlas webhooks.

Collecting a payment

To collect a payment using the Atlas API, you have to make a POST request to the Initialize Checkout endpoint with details of the customer, the amount, and currency you want to collect the payment in.

For example:

const axios = require("axios");

const initiateCheckout = async () => {
  const url = "https://atlas.tryduplo.com/api/v1/checkout/initiate";

  const data = {
    currency: "NGN",
    first_name: "John",
    last_name: "Doe",
    email: "john.doe@example.com",
    amount: 1000,
    source_reference: "CHK_SRC_001",
  };

  const config = {
    headers: {
      Authorization: "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
    },
  };

  try {
    const response = await axios.post(url, data, config);
    console.log(response.data);
    return response.data;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Error:", error.response?.data || error.message);
    throw error;
  }
};

// Call the function
initiateCheckout();

For added security, you can encrypt the request payload before sending it to the Atlas API.

When you send the request, you will receive a response similar to the code block below:

{
  "requestId": "abcd1234-5678-90ef-ghij-1234567890kl",
  "requestTimestamp": "2025-07-16 09:15:00",
  "message": "Checkout Transaction Initiated successfully.",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "data": {
    "checkoutUrl": "https://checkout.tryduplo.com?ref=CHK_6WZSIYEK43",
    "checkoutReference": "CHK_6WZSIYEK43",
    "amount": {
      "value": 1000,
      "currency": "NGN",
      "formatted": "NGN 1000.00"
    }
  }
}

The response will contain a link to a checkout page where you can redirect your customer to. Once your customer completes a payment, Atlas will verify the payment and send you a webhook to confirm the final status of the transaction.

Follow this guide to learn how you can configure and verify webhooks from Atlas .

Once your application verifies that the webhook was sent by Atlas and has not been used before, you can fulfil the service.

Related guides

• Atlas Checkout
• Customers & Virtual Accounts