Accept a payment using separate charges and transfers

A Checkout Session controls what your customer sees in the payment form such as line items, the order amount and currency, and acceptable payment methods. Add a checkout button to your website that calls a server-side endpoint to create a Checkout Session.

On your server, create a Checkout Session and redirect your customer to the URL returned in the response.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price_data][currency]"=usd \
  -d "line_items[0][price_data][product_data][name]"="Restaurant delivery service" \
  -d "line_items[0][price_data][unit_amount]"=10000 \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d "payment_intent_data[transfer_group]"=ORDER100 \
  -d mode=payment \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success?session_id={CHECKOUT_SESSION_ID}"

Stripe sends a checkout.session.completed event when the payment completes. Use a webhook to receive these events and run actions, like sending an order confirmation email to your customer, logging the sale in a database, or starting a shipping workflow.

Listen for these events instead of waiting on a callback from the client. On the client, the customer could close the browser window or quit the app before the callback executes. Some payment methods also take 2-14 days for payment confirmation. Setting up your integration to listen for asynchronous events enables you to accept multiple payment methods with a single integration.

Handle the following events when collecting payments with Checkout:

These events all include the Checkout Session object. After the payment succeeds, the underlying PaymentIntent status changes from processing to succeeded or a failure status.

On your server, send funds from your account to a connected account by creating a Transfer and specifying the transfer_group used.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/transfers \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d amount=7000 \
  -d currency=usd \
  -d destination=
"{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}" \
  -d transfer_group=ORDER100

Transfer and charge amounts don’t have to match. You can split a single charge between multiple transfers or include multiple charges in a single transfer. The following example creates an additional transfer associated with the same transfer_group.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/transfers \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d amount=2000 \
  -d currency=usd \
  -d destination={{OTHER_CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}} \
  -d transfer_group=ORDER100

Transfer options

You can assign any value to the transfer_group string, but it must represent a single business action. You can also make a transfer with neither an associated charge nor a transfer_group—for example, when you must pay a provider but there’s no associated customer payment.

By default, a transfer request fails when the amount exceeds the platform’s available account balance. Stripe doesn’t automatically retry failed transfer requests.

You can avoid failed transfer requests for transfers that are associated with charges. When you specify the associated charge as the transfer’s source_transaction, the transfer request automatically succeeds. However, we don’t execute the transfer until the funds from that charge are available in the platform account.