How Checkout works

Checkout lifecycle

1. When customers are ready to complete their purchase, your application creates a new Checkout Session.
2. The Checkout Session provides a URL that redirects customers to a Stripe-hosted payment page.
3. Customers enter their payment details on the payment page and complete the transaction.
4. After the transaction, a webhook fulfills the order using the checkout.session.completed event.

Low-code integration

Checkout requires minimal coding and is the best choice for most integrations because of its prebuilt features and customization options. You can integrate Checkout by creating a Checkout Session and collecting customer payment details. Collect payments by redirecting customers to a Stripe-hosted payment page.

Compare Checkout to other Stripe payment options to determine the best one for you. Checkout displays a payment form to collect customer payment information, validates cards, handles errors, and so on.

Features

Custom branding

You can set fonts, colors, icons, and field styles for your Stripe-hosted Checkout page using the Branding settings in the Dashboard. For more information, see Customize your integration.

Custom domains

If you use Stripe’s custom domain feature, you can serve Stripe-hosted Checkout pages on a subdomain of your custom domain. Custom domains are a paid feature. For information, see Pricing and fees.

Checkout Session

The Checkout Session is a programmatic representation of what your customers see on the checkout page. After creating a Checkout Session, redirect your customers to the Session’s URL to complete the purchase. When customers complete their purchase, you can fulfill their orders by configuring an event destination to process Checkout Session events. This code snippet from the quickstart guide is an example of how to create a Checkout Session in your application.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d mode=payment \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success"

One-time and recurring payments

Allow customers to make one-time payments or subscribe to a product or service by setting the mode parameter in a Checkout Session.

Mixed cart

Create a mixed cart in Checkout that lets your customers purchase Subscription items and one-time purchase items at the same time. To create a mixed cart, set the mode parameter to subscription and include the Price IDs, or price_data, for each line_item in the line_items array. Price IDs come from Price objects created using the Stripe Dashboard or API and allow you to store information about your product catalog in Stripe.

You can also use price_data to reference information from an external database where you’re hosting price and product details without storing product catalog information on Stripe. For more information, see Build a subscriptions integration.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"={{RECURRING_PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d "line_items[1][price]"={{ONE_TIME_PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[1][quantity]"=1 \
  -d mode=subscription \
  --data-urlencode success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  --data-urlencode cancel_url="https://example.com/cancel"

Payment methods

You can view, enable, and disable different payment methods in the Stripe Dashboard at any time. Stripe enables certain payment methods for you by default. We might also enable additional payment methods after notifying you. View our complete list of payment methods.

Save payment details and default payment methods

You can save payment details for future use by sending an API parameter when you create a Session. Options to save payment details include:

• Single payment: If your Checkout Session uses payment mode, set the payment_intent_data.setup_future_usage parameter.
• Subscription payment: If your Checkout Session uses subscription mode, Stripe saves the payment method by default.
• Multiple saved payment methods: If a customer has multiple payment methods saved, you can store a default payment method to the Customer object’s default_payment_method field. However, these payment methods don’t appear for return purchases in Checkout.

Guest customers

The Customer object represents a customer of your business. It stores their information and associates them with their subscriptions and payments. Checkout Sessions that don’t use existing Customers or create new ones are associated with guest customers instead.

Expiration

By default, Checkout Sessions expire after 24 hours.

You can set a custom expiration time for a Checkout Session by setting the expires_at parameter. It can be anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours after Checkout Session creation.

You can also use the expire API to expire a Checkout Session.

Complete a transaction

To automate business flows after a transaction has occurred, register an event destination and build a webhook endpoint handler. Consider the following events and automations to enable:

• Process the checkout.session.completed event to fullfill orders when a customer completes their purchase.
• Process the checkout.session.expired event to return items to your inventory or send users a cart abandonment email when they don’t make a purchase and their cart expires.