#lo_sun
peak cliff
fickle harness
This is a really nebulous series of questions. Can we hone in on one question at a time? You said you're rearchitecting your system, and there is more than one right answer for a payment flow, so the finding the "right" one is going to have a lot to do with what you want out of the system
old pumice
yeah sorry thought that may be the case - we're actually completely reworking it so there is no need to consider the previous setup really.
The intention is to have an endpoint for uploading pdf files along with related data that is done as a multipart form request. It is intended to be one time payment, with no signup.
actually to clarify - they will supply an email address - but we will not be managing any user account and dont intend to handle any payment information
fickle harness
So far it sounds like Stripe Checkout is probably the easiest/fastest way to do that (minus the document upload). What document are they uploading and why?
old pumice
they are pdf documents, novel openings for our competition platform
for us to then offer some confirmation via transactional email, is it possible to setup webhooks for this purpose and get consistent results? We seemed to have trouble with this on the previous (paypal) version
fickle harness
Okay, but does the PDF have anything to do with the payment?
old pumice
Yes, they are paying to suubmit the pdf
fickle harness
Okay, but it doesn't contain any payment information and you don't need Stripe to do anything with the PDF, correct?
old pumice
that's correct
the pdf is their own work - they are paying to have us judge and store their work
the important part I guess is correlating their submission with the payment they make then
fickle harness
Got it, okay. Moving onto the next part of the question:
for us to then offer some confirmation via transactional email, is it possible to setup webhooks for this purpose and get consistent results?
Email notifications can be set up for Checkout as well as the Payment Intents API: https://stripe.com/docs/receipts
As far as correlating the payment with their submission, you would likely need to track that on your end, though Stripe has a metadata hash on practically every object where you could store a unique ID that correlates to their PDF submission.
For example, here's the metadata field on a Payment Intent: https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_intents/update
You can get whatever metadata you set on the object whenever you retrieve the Payment Intent.
old pumice
As far as correlating the payment with their submission, you would likely need t...
ok I'll need to do a little reading on that to work out what will suit us best there
ok - sorry to jump back, for the reciept that does look useful although it seems that we loose control of managing that email with our mail tools - but also, we would ideally like to provide email notification of a pyament failure, which could also prompt us to remove unpayed submissions
would that be possible through webhooks when using checkout?
fickle harness
Would you want to do that via your own email system then?
There are a ton of webhook events you can listen for (see here: https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/types) that you can use to trigger server-side actions
old pumice
ideally we'd probably just handle everything that way for consistency
so just a charge.failed event for example?
fickle harness
ideally we'd probably just handle everything that way for consistency
Do you mean "that way" as in using your own email server? Or do you mean "that way" as in using Stripe to send those email notifications?
old pumice
using our own mail system - sorry I'll try to be more explicit! 😅
I think that largely makes sense - checkout was what I was imagining would make sense and it seems we should be able to manage the couple of post processing things using the webhooks
I think that will cover it for me though for now so thanks for your time
fickle harness
Yeah! Checkout seems right for you, and there are a few Checkout events your integration can listen for to trigger emails. It should be noted that you'll have to explicitly turn off emails for Checkout if you're using your own emails server though: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/emails