How Checkout works

Checkout lifecycle

1. When a customer is ready to complete their purchase, your application creates a new Checkout Session.
2. You mount Checkout as an embeddable component on your website to show a payment form.
3. Customers enter their payment details and complete the transaction.
4. After the transaction, the checkout.session.completed webhook event triggers the order fulfillment process.

Low-code integration

Checkout requires minimal coding and is the best choice for most integrations because of its prebuilt functionalities and customization options. You can integrate Checkout by creating a Checkout Session and collecting customer payment details. Collect payment by embedding a payment form in your website.

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.

Built-in and customizable features

Stripe Checkout has the following built-in and customizable features:

Built-in features

• PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and Link
• Responsive mobile design
• SCA-ready
• CAPTCHAs
• PCI compliance
• Card validation
• Error messaging
• Adjustable quantities
• Automatic tax collection
• International language support
• Adaptive Pricing

Customizable features

• Collect taxes
• Custom branding with colors, buttons, and font
• Cross-sells
• Global payment methods
• Subscription upsells
• Custom domains (Stripe-hosted page only)
• Email receipts
• Apply discounts
• Custom success page
• Recover abandoned carts
• Autofill payment details with Link
• Collect Tax IDs
• Collect shipping information
• Collect phone numbers
• Set the subscription billing cycle date

Custom branding

You can set fonts, colors, icons, and field styles for your embedded form using the Branding settings in the Dashboard. For more information, see Customize your integration.

Checkout Session

The Checkout Session is a programmatic representation of what your customers see on the payment form. After creating a Checkout Session, mount Checkout on your payment page 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_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d mode=payment \
  -d ui_mode=embedded \
  --data-urlencode return_url="https://example.com/return"

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_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -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 \
  -d ui_mode=embedded \
  --data-urlencode return_url="https://example.com/return"

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, and it helps tracking subscriptions and payments that belong to the same customer. Checkout Sessions that don’t create Customers are associated with guest customers instead.

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