Fulfill ordersBeta
Learn how to fulfill orders after a customer pays with Custom Checkout.
When you receive a payment, you might need to take action to provide your customer with what they paid for. For example, you might need to grant them access to a service, or you might need to ship them physical goods. This process is known as fulfillment, and you have two ways to handle this process:
- Manually: You can manually fulfill orders using information that Stripe makes available to you. For example, you can monitor the Dashboard, check payment notification emails, or look at reports and then fulfill orders.
- Automatically: You can build an automated fulfillment system. Recommended
The first option works for low volume or experimental ventures, but for most situations we recommend automating fulfillment. The rest of this guide shows you how to build an automatic fulfillment system.
Automatic fulfillment
The automatic fulfillment system outlined below uses a combination of webhooks and a redirect to your website to trigger fulfillment. You must use webhooks to make sure fulfillment happens for every payment, and redirects let your customers access services or fulfillment details immediately after paying.
Create a fulfillment functionServer-side
Create a function on your server to fulfill successful payments. Webhooks trigger this function, and it’s called when customers are sent to your website after completing checkout. This guide refers to this function as fulfill_
, but you can name the function whatever you wish.
Your fulfill_
function must:
- Correctly handle being called multiple times with the same Checkout Session ID.
- Accept a Checkout Session ID as an argument.
- Retrieve the Checkout Session from the API with the line_items property expanded.
- Check the payment_status property to determine if it requires fulfillment.
- Perform fulfillment of the line items.
- Record fulfillment status for the provided Checkout Session.
Use the code below as a starting point for your fulfill_
function. The TODO
comments indicate any functionality you must implement.
Note
The code snippets below might name the fulfill_
function fulfillCheckout
or FulfillCheckout
depending on the language selected, but they all represent the same function.
Note
If a Checkout Session has many line items, use auto-pagination with the API for Checkout line items to retrieve all of them.
Depending on the payment methods you accept and your business needs, you might want to have your fulfill_
function do the following:
- Provision access to services.
- Trigger shipment of goods.
- Save a copy of the payment details and line items in your own database.
- Send the customer a custom receipt email if you don’t have Stripe’s receipts enabled.
- Reconcile line items and quantities purchased if you allow customers to adjust quantities during checkout.
- Update inventory or stock records.
Create a payment event handlerServer-side
To trigger fulfillment, create a webhook event handler to listen for payment events and trigger your fulfill_
function.
When someone pays you, it creates a checkout.
event. Set up an endpoint on your server to accept, process, and confirm receipt of these events.
Some payment methods aren’t instant, such as ACH direct debit and other bank transfers. Funds won’t be immediately available when Checkout completes. Delayed payment methods generate a checkout.
event when payment succeeds later.
Note
The webhook secret (whsec_
) shown in the code below comes from either the Stripe CLI or your webhook endpoint. You can use the Stripe CLI for local testing, and Stripe uses a webhook endpoint to send events to your handler when it’s running on a server. See the next section for more details.
You might also want to listen for and handle checkout.
events. For example, you can send an email to your customer when a delayed payment fails.
Test your event handler locally
The quickest way to develop and test your webhook event handler is with the Stripe CLI. If you don’t have the Stripe CLI, follow the install guide to get started.
When the Stripe CLI is installed, you can test your event handler locally. Run your server (for example, on localhost:4242
), then run the stripe listen command to have the Stripe CLI forward events to your local server:
stripe listen --forward-to localhost:4242/webhook Ready! Your webhook signing secret is 'whsec_<REDACTED>' (^C to quit)
Add the webhook secret (whsec_
) to your event handling code, then test fulfillment by going through your checkout as a customer.
When the payment completes, verify the following:
- On your command line, where
stripe listen
is running, it shows acheckout.
event forwarded to your local server.session. completed - Your server logs show the expected output from your
fulfill_
function.checkout
Create a webhook endpoint
After testing locally, get your webhook event handler up and running on your server. Next, create a webhook endpoint to send checkout.
events to your server, then test the checkout flow again.
Trigger fulfillment on your landing pageRecommended
Listening to webhooks is required to make sure you always trigger fulfillment for every payment, but webhooks can sometimes be delayed. To optimize your payment flow and guarantee immediate fulfillment when your customer is present, trigger fulfillment from your landing page as well. You can can configure the landing page by passing return_url when creating the Checkout Session, or passing returnUrl to confirm
on the front end.
Use the Checkout Session ID from the URL you specified to do the following:
- When your server receives a request for your checkout landing page, extract the Checkout Session ID from the URL.
- Run your
fulfill_
function with the ID provided.checkout - Render the page after the fulfillment attempt is complete.
When you render your landing page you can display the following:
- Details from the fulfillment process.
- Links or information about services the customer now has access to.
- Shipping or logistical details for physical goods.
Webhooks are required
You can’t rely on triggering fulfillment only from your checkout landing page, because your customers aren’t guaranteed to visit that page. For example, someone can pay successfully and then lose their connection to the internet before your landing page loads.
Set up a webhook event handler to have Stripe send payment events directly to your server, bypassing the client entirely. Webhooks are the most reliable way to know when you get paid. If webhook event delivery fails, we retry several times.