Payment Intent Lifecycle in Chargebee Checkout

This article explains how Payment Intents work in Chargebee Checkout, including their creation, authentication, capture, and expiry. It also clarifies why some payments appear in the gateway but not in Chargebee.

Related scenarios

• You see a refunded charge in your payment gateway, but no corresponding record in Chargebee.
• A customer completed payment, but the subscription or invoice was not created.
• The customer abandoned the checkout after 3D Secure authentication.
• You want to understand when a Payment Intent is created, consumed, or expires.
• You manually captured a payment in your gateway and it did not reflect in Chargebee.

Solution

A Payment Intent represents a single payment attempt initiated after the customer submits payment details in Chargebee Checkout. It tracks the payment's progress through stages such as authentication, authorization, capture, and expiry.

Chargebee captures the payment as soon as the customer authorizes it on the final payment step of Checkout. If the authorization is interrupted before it completes (for example, the customer abandons 3D Secure or wallet authentication), the payment intent remains in the "in progress" state and expires automatically after a timeout.

You can view all possible Payment Intent statuses and more in this document.

Steps to understand the payment flow

1. Payment Intent creation

A Payment Intent is created once the customer submits valid payment details. Loading the checkout page does not create a Payment Intent.

2. 3D Secure authentication

If the card requires 3D Secure authentication, the customer is redirected to the gateway's authentication page. After successful verification (such as OTP, fingerprint, or other methods), the Payment Intent moves to the authorized state, meaning the funds are reserved and ready for capture.

3. Capture in hosted pages

On successful authorization, Chargebee captures the payment immediately, creates/updates the subscription, and marks the invoice as paid. This happens even if the customer does not return to the Chargebee hosted page after the authorization.

4. Uncaptured authorizations

If the authentication is abandoned or an error interrupts the authorization before it completes, the payment intent remains in the "in progress" state and expires automatically after a timeout.

Additional information

• Payment Intents with statuses inited, in_progress, or authorized automatically expire after 30 minutes if not captured. Your site can be configured with a different window.
• Manual captures directly in the gateway are possible but not recommended, as Chargebee will not record them, leading to reconciliation mismatches.
• For accuracy and consistency, always allow Chargebee to manage the capture process.