Sandbox environment

The sandbox lets you exercise your whole integration — creating transactions, completing payments, and receiving callbacks — without moving real money.

	Sandbox	Production
Base URL	api.test.sandbox.pesepay.com/payments-engine	api.pesepay.com/api/payments-engine
Money moved	None	Real
Keys	Sandbox integration + encryption key from your application	Production integration + encryption key

Every code sample in this documentation defaults to the sandbox URL — swap in your production base URL and keys only once you’ve worked through the go-live checklist.

What the sandbox supports

The sandbox is deliberately smaller than production. Plan your test matrix around what’s actually there:

	Sandbox	Production
Currencies	USD only	USD and Zimbabwe dollars
Payment methods	EcoCash PZW211, Visa PZW204, Mastercard PZW205	All methods
Amount limits	Different from production — Visa in particular is capped far lower	See the overview

Caution

You can’t test InnBucks, Omari, Zimswitch or PayGo in the sandbox, and you can’t test a Zimbabwe dollar checkout at all. Plan a small-value production payment for each of those before you rely on them — it’s on the go-live checklist.

Note

Because sandbox limits differ from production, an amount that passes here can be rejected live, and the EcoCash multi-part behaviour can’t be reproduced in the sandbox. Read limits from Get Payment Methods by Currency in each environment rather than assuming they match.

What to exercise

Use the test credentials to trigger both successful and failed payments, so your error handling gets exercised before it meets a real customer. Beyond the happy path, confirm that your callback handler is idempotent and that your reconciliation job catches a payment whose callback never arrived.