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round turret
I am trying to onboard a customer who is using elavon to process payments right now
As part of our flow, we add credit cards to people's "wallets" by using stripe.PaymentMethod.create
Does this functionality under the hood perform a zero dollar auth - client wants to make sure that the cards are legit
client is used to dealing with things under the hood - and I have no clue how to verify
small idol
Hello! I just want to acknowledge the question. I'm working on some other threads but will get to you as soon as I can.
round turret
ok
small idol
Hi @round turret , thanks for waiting. Stripe sometimes perform a $0/$1 auth to verify if card is valid [0]. But if you want to verify if a card is valid without a charge, the way we recommend to do this is saving the customer card in Stripe [1]
[0] https://support.stripe.com/questions/faq-for-customers-of-businesses-using-stripe
[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/check-if-a-card-is-valid-without-a-charge
round turret
Hey thanks I've through both, but I was wondering if I can get some more clear guidance, specifically for paymentmethod.create
It only sometimes - can we quantify that a bit more - is this like 99% of the time of like 10% of the time?
small idol
I can't quantify it. But there are two things I wanna flag
1/ paymentmethod.create alone does not allow for the saved payment method to be reuse in the future ; here I'm assuming the saved cards are meant to be reused in the future. To reuse a card, it must be attached to a customer [0].
2/ The card information is verified when the card is saved, but it only verifies that the information is valid. It cannot check credit limits or account balances to guarantee that a card will have sufficient funds when you do decide to charge it.
round turret
great point about #1
let me give the skeleton pseudocode
So yes, we basically run:
- paymentmethod.create
- paymentmethod.attach
so you're saying the verification happens in #1, right?
and verification talks to the network, right via $0 verification?
small idol
No, I am saying validation happens after the card is saved to the customer, which is #2.
and verification talks to the network, right via $0 verification?
I'm not understanding this
round turret
So I'm still struggling to wrap my head conceptually around this well enough to give a response back to the customer.
Btw, here customer is another merchant because we're using connect, and they're very familiar with elavon.
So what I'm hearing is that paymentmethod.attach runs verification.
I think I need to understand two more things:
- When you say "run verification", this does not mean internal stripe validation, right? Client is expecting that stripe talks to the card network to verify that the card is valid (ignoring credit limits), not stripe-internal verification
- It sounds like it's difficult to quanity "sometimes", but if I tell the client that stripe "sometimes" verifies the card, I'm worried they will get frustrated at the lack of information. Can you elaborate a bit more on this please? If you can't speak to the number, can you speak to the policy? Wheen does stripe determine if a card should be verified or not? If it's mastercard / visa / AE, is it verified?
I think #2 is also important for us to understand because we have a custom contract and we pay for each of these verifications 🙂
small idol
1/ When we say "validation", it means Stripe talks to the card issuer to verify that the card information is correct. This is also called an "authorisation charge"
2/ Stripe verifies whether a card can be used when the card is saved for future usage (which is our Save and Reuse flow [0][1]). I think you can focus on the conditions that needs to be met for Stripe to check if a card is valid, as opposed to when card validation happens.
[0] https://docs.stripe.com/payments/save-and-reuse
[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/faq-for-customers-of-businesses-using-stripe