Using stored payment cards

Sharetribe Flex allows you to store the payment card of a customer for future purchases. Doing this provides multiple benefits: it streamlines the checkout process for existing customers and allows you to place additional charges to the payment card of the customer.

Flex Templates for Web (FTW) include a checkout workflow, which offers a box for the customer to check if they want to store their card for future purchases. Once they've stored it, they are offered the option to use the same card for subsequent purchases without entering the details again.

In addition, each user has a page called "payment methods" in their account settings. From this page, the user can store a new credit card, delete a stored card, or replace a stored card with a new one.

Learn how storing payment card works in FTW

Read API documentation on storing credit cards

Frequently asked questions about storing payment cards

How many payment cards can I store per customer?

Right now you can only store one payment card per customer. If you store a new card, the old one is replaced.

How do I edit the details of a stored credit card?

You can't edit the details of a stored payment card. Instead, you need to delete the card and create a new card.

Can I create delayed charges?

Sometimes you might want to store the payment card details of the customer when they make a booking, but initiate the actual charge only later. A typical example could be booking a venue for a wedding. The initial booking might be done a year in advance, but the charge might happen only a bit before the event, or even after it.

It's possible for you to adjust your transaction process to add a transition that attempts to automatically charge the card of the customer at a specific point in time. A separate article describes how you can build such a process.

Can I create extra charges to the payment card of the customer?

Sometimes you might want to create extra charges for a stored card after an initial purchase. For example, if a rented item is stolen or damaged by the customer or returned late, you might want to charge the customer extra to cover these costs.

You can initiate additional charges directly from your Stripe dashboard. You should always notify the customer in question about why an extra charge was placed on their card. The additional charges won't get displayed in Flex Console. The money from the extra charges is placed to your platform's Stripe balance, from which it is moved to your bank account. If a payout to the provider (in this case the owner of the item) is needed, you will need to handle it manually from your own bank account.

Also, it's important to remember that if your marketplace is accepting payments from European customers, starting from September 14th these customer will sometimes need to use Strong Customer Authentication to verify credit card purchases. Thus, you can't necessarily create additional charges to their card without allowing them to approve the charge with Strong Customer Authentication.

Can I enable recurring / subscription payments?

Stripe supports subscriptions, which could be used to allow your providers to charge recurring payments from your customers. As an example, a customer might rent a storage unit from a provider. You might want to create a subscription that automatically charges the customer's card every month, until the customer cancels the storage subscription.

Right now, Sharetribe Flex doesn't offer support for Stripe subscriptions. However, there is a workaround. Once the customer has made the initial booking and payment, you would send a request to your own backend component, which would then create a subscription with the stored credit card of the customer. The subsequent subscription payments would then not be visible in Flex Console, but you could monitor them from Stripe dashboard.