Payment Intent

Overview

What does Payment Intent mean?

A payment intent is a system record representing the business objective to collect a defined payment before one specific execution attempt succeeds.

How it works in practice

A payment intent is a persistent record of the customer's intended payment before final settlement. It can hold the amount, pricing currency, merchant, allowed assets and networks, status, expiration and references to payment attempts. The checkout uses it to create or resume a transaction flow without generating a fresh commercial order for every page refresh. After the customer pays, the system advances the intent through a carefully defined state machine using verified transaction evidence, not just the wallet's user-interface response.

Further operational details

A payment intent is a system record representing the business objective to collect a defined payment before one specific execution attempt succeeds. It can preserve amount, currency, customer, methods, confirmation rules, attempts, expiry, and the final outcome across retries or provider changes.

Important failure modes include duplicate or delayed events, wrong destinations or currencies, stale instructions, unavailable providers, unsupported retries, and customer-facing status that differs from authoritative records. For Payment Intent, this point supports the definition's focus on payment intent is a system record representing the business objective to collect a defined payment before one specific.

Limits and common misunderstandings

Payment intents are not blockchain transactions and may never be funded. Repeated attempts must not create duplicate fulfillment; amount edits should require a new version or intent, not silently alter an already displayed request.

Related glossary terms

Payment Identifier; Payment Retry; Bitcoin Invoice