After a Klarna customer token has been created by you, the token will live on in Klarna's system. This article explains the lifecycle of a token.
A Klarna purchase token is the combination of consumer details and payment method data, together with a connection to a specific merchant. These purchase tokens are stored in Klarna’s internal secure databases and no private information is externally shared from them.
The advantage of purchase tokens compared with a regular purchase is that, since customer data and payment method data are already collected, all information necessary to complete a purchase is already completed.
Thus the merchant only needs to add information about a specific order and send a request to place an order.
Note: As a merchant you will have to notify your customers both that you are creating purchase tokens for them and how these are used to create orders!
You can read more about what actions are possible to take with purchase tokens in the use case article on how to use and place orders from purchase tokens.
There is no fixed lifetime for tokens. As long as they are used to create new orders they will remain active in Klarna’s systems.
As a merchant, you can decide to cancel a token whenever you will not use it anymore. This is done through updating the status of the token as described in the update token article.
A token is always tied to a specific merchant. On Klarna’s side this ownership of a token is done on a merchant ID-level. This Merchant ID is given to you when you are onboarded to Klarna’s system.
If you are using different Merchant IDs for different purposes within your company (e.g. one merchant ID used for signing up customer and one for actually placing orders), it is possible to share tokens across different merchant IDs.
If you want to enable this, please reach out to your contact person at Klarna.