Collect on-screen inputs

Use Terminal to collect inputs from your customers.

Readers: Stripe Reader S700 and BBPOS WisePOS E

With Terminal smart readers, you can display input forms and collect information from your customers. You can choose from six input types and they can be used in a variety of use cases.

Collect your customer identifier for loyalty redemption with the phone or email input and process it on your backend.
Have your customer acknowledge a waiver or agreement with the signature input.
Ask your customer to fill out a questionnaire with the selection or text input.

You can display input forms anytime before payment, post payment and outside of a payment cycle.

Supported input types.

Note

Don’t use collect_inputs to collect sensitive data (including protected health information and customer payment card information), or any information restricted by law.

Collect inputs

To collect inputs using Terminal’s smart readers, use the collect_inputs command. The API communicates with the reader to display a prebuilt UI.

Customization

You can customize the appearance and behavior of all input types:

Set important inputs as required to ensure they’re collected. For required inputs, the Skip button is hidden.
Provide context to your customer by specifying the text you want to display on the reader screen for each input using custom_text.

Field name	Field location	Maximum characters
`title`	custom_text	40

`description`	custom_text	500 when used with the `selection` form, 100 when used with other form type
`submit_button`	custom_text	30

`skip_button`	custom_text	14

Use line breaks \n in your text for better formatting.
Add up to 4 toggles that customers can enable or disable for Boolean options, agreements, or opt-ins.

Email and selection form with toggle

Field name	Field location	Maximum characters
`title`	toggles	50, 25 when used with toggle description
`description`	toggles	50, 25 when used with toggle title

Additional customization is available for selection inputs. When specifying the choices, you can emphasize or de-emphasize choices using the style parameter.

Primary and secondary selection choice styles

Metadata

You can include metadata, like a customer or order ID, in your request. The request payload includes the specified metadata, which appears in both the synchronous response and the success or failure events. By including a unique identifier, you can more easily identify and handle the incoming event.

Customer interaction

When the reader begins collecting inputs, it displays the first input from the list. The customer must make a selection, provide a signature, or use the keyboard to proceed with required inputs. For optional inputs, the customer has the option to skip to the next requested input.

After the customer has completed all the inputs, the reader changes to a transitional state for 3 seconds, waiting for a subsequent request. If there is no subsequent request after 3 seconds, the reader changes back to the splash screen.

Note

You are fully responsible for being aware of, and complying with all applicable laws and regulations governing your use of this feature, and must in relation to such use, obtain, as applicable, all necessary consents, authorizations, licenses, rights, and permissions. If you use input collected by, or output displayed from a Terminal smart reader to enter into contracts with, or provide notices to your customers, you are fully responsible for ensuring the legal validity and enforceability of such contracts or notices.

Receive input data

When all inputs have been collected or skipped, Stripe sends a request to your webhook endpoint. The request payload is identical to the response when calling collect_inputs, but adds a few additional parameters:

For signature type inputs, the value is a file ID that retrieves the signature image as an SVG.
For selection type inputs, the id and text correspond to the selected choice’s id and text.
For phone, email, text, and numeric inputs, the value is the string of the customer’s response.
If an optional input is skipped by the customer, the skipped parameter is set to true.
The value of each toggle is populated with enabled or disabled.

Use the curl command below as an example to create a webhook endpoint to receive the collected inputs.

Command Line
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/webhook_endpoints \
  -usk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
: \
  --header "Stripe-Version: 2025-05-28.basil;" \
  --data-urlencode "url"="https://example.com/webhook/endpoint" \
  --data-urlencode "api_version"="2025-05-28.basil;" \
  --data-urlencode "enabled_events[]"="terminal.reader.action_succeeded" \
  --data-urlencode "enabled_events[]"="terminal.reader.action_failed"

Subscribe to events to receive collected inputs as soon as they’re available. Alternatively, you can retrieve the events from the reader as a backup if your backend fails to consume the event. Stripe sends two webhooks to notify your backend of the reader’s status:

terminal.reader.action_succeeded: Sent when a collect_inputs action succeeds.
terminal.reader.action_failed: Sent when a collect_inputs action fails. This includes timeouts, which occur after the reader screen isn’t touched for 2 minutes.

Download signature images

To download the collected signature image, retrieve the file and use your secret key to access its url.

Note

Stripe stores the signature images you collect for 7 days. If you need to use signature images more than 7 days after collecting them, download the file and store it. You are fully responsible for being aware of and complying with all laws that apply to your use, storage, and disclosure of your customers’ signatures.

Test your integration

You can test your integration by using a simulated reader. After creating a simulated reader, start collecting inputs using the simulated reader.

The simulated reader supports simulating the following scenarios:

Successful input collection without skipping any inputs
Successful input collection with skipping all non-required inputs
Failed input collection because of a timeout

When simulating successful input collection, the simulated reader returns a hard-coded value for each input based on the type.