When you process payments using the Toast hosted checkout integration, you use the customers API to store information about guests, merchants, or partners that make those payments. You can store payment methods for customers and use them for future payments.

For example, you might use the customers API to save or retrieve information about a Toast platform restaurant guest who is making a payment using the Toast hosted checkout integration on an online ordering website. If the restaurant guest chooses to save a payment method for future use, your integration can create a customer record for that guest using the customers API. If the guest chooses to use a saved payment method, your integration can get information about that saved payment method using the customers API.

Note: the customers API and other components of the Toast hosted checkout integration use the term customer to mean a person or organization making a payment (a payor). Toast platform restaurant APIs and products use the term guest to mean a person who visits a Toast platform restaurant or store. In Toast hosted checkout integration APIs, like the customers API, using the term "customer" instead of the the hospitality term "guest" is better aligned with other, global payments processing infrastructure and is more inclusive of transaction types handled by the Toast platform.