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Payments
Business operations
Financial services
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Overview
Overview
How cards work
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U.S. and Canadian cards
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HomePaymentsOnline payments

How cards work

See how a credit or debit card payment works online, step by step.

Cards are one of the most popular ways to pay online, with broad global reach. There are different types of cards and several steps in the process. To build a Stripe integration that supports all of your customers, see what goes on behind the scenes of a card payment.

Checking card details

Stripe checks that the details provided are formatted correctly (for example, the expiry date isn’t in the past). There’s no guarantee that the card itself is valid yet.

Customer authentication

Some banks, especially in regulated regions like Europe and India, may prompt the customer to authenticate a purchase (for example, by texting the customer a code to enter on the bank’s website). Watch our video to learn more.

Authorization

The bank checks for sufficient funds and, if successful, holds the amount on the customer’s account to guarantee it for the merchant.

Capture

The money moves from the issuing bank to the merchant’s account.

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Stripe Shell
Test mode
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Welcome to the Stripe Shell! This is a graphical user interface of the Stripe CLI. You can use it to discover webhook events and manage your Stripe resources. By pressing ctrl + ` you can toggle it open from any page within the Stripe documentation. - View supported commands: - Listen for webhook events: - Trigger webhook events: - Call Stripe APIs: stripe [api resource] [api operation] (e.g. )
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