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What is the sandbox?

The Star-Pay sandbox is a fully isolated test environment that mirrors production behavior. You can create orders, simulate payments, receive callbacks, and verify signatures without touching real money or real customer accounts. Use the sandbox during development and QA to confirm your integration works correctly before switching to live credentials.

Sandbox base URL

The sandbox API is available at:
https://starpayqa.starpayethiopia.com/v1/starpay-api
This is the QA endpoint. All API paths (/trdp/order, /trdp/verify, etc.) are identical to production.

Getting sandbox credentials

Obtain your test API secret from the merchant dashboard. Use this secret in the x-api-secret request header for all sandbox calls. Do not use your live API secret in sandbox requests, or vice versa.

What works in sandbox

  • Creating orders via POST /trdp/order
  • Verifying payment status via POST /trdp/verify
  • Receiving payment result callbacks to your callbackURL
  • Testing HMAC signature verification on incoming callbacks

What doesn’t work in sandbox

No real money moves in the sandbox. Real customer phone numbers will not receive a USSD Push prompt. Use the test phone numbers provided for this environment.

Testing flow

1

Use sandbox credentials

Set the x-api-secret header to your test API secret from the merchant dashboard.
2

Use a test phone number

Set customerPhoneNumber to one of the supported test numbers. Real phone numbers will not trigger a simulated payment in the sandbox.
3

Create an order

Send a POST /trdp/order request with your test credentials and a test phone number. You will receive an order_id and a payment_url in the response.
4

Simulate payment completion

Use the sandbox payment URL or the merchant dashboard to simulate a successful or failed payment for the order.
5

Verify payment status or check your callback

Call POST /trdp/verify with the orderId to confirm the status, or inspect the payload delivered to your callbackURL.
Always complete a full end-to-end test in the sandbox before going live. This includes verifying that your callback handler correctly processes both PAID and FAILED statuses.

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