Great question!
Phone numbers
Phone numbers should be provided as a string of 10 digits.
8187771234
When you supply a phone number that is invalid (due to an invalid format, it not existing, or being unreachable) this will happen:
Request:
{
...
"destinationId": "0000000000",
"destinationType": "Phone"
}
Response:
{
"Success": false,
"Message": "Unexpected exception",
"Response": null
}
As you can see, the request will fail with Success
flagged to false
and no funds will be sent. What probably stands out here is that the current failure message is quite unhelpful -- this is on our to do list of things to be fixed. When it's fixed, we'll add the new error messages to the Error Codes table on the documentation page.
Since I don't know how granular the error codes will be (we may just return "Invalid phone number."
), you may want to handle the validation on your end if you are looking to catch specific errors such as an invalid area code or a number with 14 digits.
User Experience
The recipient will receive, via text message or email, an invitation to register a Dwolla account in order to claim their funds. Here's are examples of both:
SMS:
"You've received money from Gordon Zheng! Claim at dwolla.com/phone. Your code: 99999"
Email:
As soon as the user is finished creating and verifying their account, the funds will immediately be available. It's important that the user creates the account with the exact same phone number or email they received the payment with.