How PaymentIntents work
Payments involving asynchronous processes can be complex to manage. For example, a user might be required to confirm a payment using 3D Secure. Asynchronous payment flows are hard to manage because they depend on customer interactions that happen outside of your application. PaymentIntents and SetupIntents simplify management by tracking the status of the flow in a state machine.
When the PaymentIntent is created, it has a status of requires_payment_method1 until a payment method is attached.
We recommend creating the PaymentIntent as soon as you know how much you want to charge, so that Stripe can record all the attempted payments.
After the customer provides their payment information, the PaymentIntent is ready to be confirmed.
In most integrations, this state is skipped because payment method information is submitted at the same time that the payment is confirmed.
If the payment requires additional actions, such as authenticating with 3D Secure, the PaymentIntent has a status of requires_action1.
Once required actions are handled, the PaymentIntent moves to processing. While for some payment methods (for example, cards) processing can be quick, other types of payment methods can take up to a few days to process.
If you’re separately authorizing and capturing funds, your PaymentIntent can instead move to requires_capture. In that case, attempting to capture the funds moves it to processing.
A PaymentIntent with a status of succeeded means that the payment flow it is driving is complete.
The funds are now in your account and you can confidently fulfill the order. If you need to refund the customer, you can use the Refunds API.
If the payment attempt fails (for example due to a decline), the PaymentIntent’s status returns to requires_payment_method so that the payment can be retried.
You can cancel a PaymentIntent at any point before it’s in a processing2 or succeeded state. Canceling it invalidates the PaymentIntent for future payment attempts, and can’t be undone. If any funds have been held, cancellation releases them.
1 Versions of the API before 2019-02-11 show requires_source instead of requires_payment_method and requires_source_action instead of requires_action.
2 You can cancel a PaymentIntent in the processing state when the associated Payment Method is US Bank Account.