> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://primer.io/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Primer Payment

A **Payment** is a first-class object that unifies the representation of a user payment across all your processors or payment methods.

A Primer payment is made of:

* a **payment status** that conforms to a unified payment lifecycle
* **payment method information** such as card details
* **order details** such as line items and currency
* **customer details** such as contact information, shipping, and billing address
* a **timeline** of events created throughout the lifecycle of the payment

<Frame caption="What is a Payment?">
  <img src="https://goat-assets.production.core.primer.io/marketing/external-docs/concepts/what-is-a-payment/what-is-a-payment.png" />
</Frame>

<Note>
  You may be familiar with the **transaction** concept used by many payment processors. Because a single Primer payment can go through multiple processors via fallbacks, retries or split routing, it can contain multiple transactions, all of which are clearly displayed on the payment's timeline.
</Note>

Payments are created automatically by Universal Checkout - our unified client-side SDK - or manually by sending a request to the Payments API.

In both cases, the following data is required to create a payment:

* An **order ID**
* An **amount** (or a list of **line items**), and a **currency code**
* A **payment method token**

### Order ID

The Order ID offers a simple way for you to tie one or multiple payments to an order in your system.

<Note>
  You can reuse the same order ID for multiple payments. This is handy to link multiple payments together.
</Note>

### Line items and currency

They describe the total amount and the currency that will be sent to the processor to authorize and capture the payment.