Payments vs Transactions and current state of Stripe checkout questions

[matteius]

I have been working to upgrade my saleor/react-storefront to this new pattern, and I would like clarification on something regarding payments vs transactions. I have made some observations between what my currently old deployed react-storefront does compared to the new saleor checkout spa. For visualization compare these two orders from the perspective of the dashboard, first the old experience:

Now the new experience:

Some key differences are:

1. by default the new Stripe integration will capture the funds immediately, whereas the old integration would have manual payment intent where capture would be performed in the dashboard. This is important because capturing incurs network fees and requires a refund to cancel, whereas an authorization can be voided without fees. I was able to figure out how to pass the payment_intent of manual to Stripe to get the authorization without the capture as before.
2. No payment record is created, in fact I see minimal mutations for creating a payment in the saleor-checkout-app. Everything seems to create transactions now, but there isn't a checkout or a payment record in the database. It sees that the payment record is used by the dashboard to allow the order payment to be captured or voided through the admin, but now with the new experience there is a disconnect between the dashboard and Stripe. It would be possible to manage captures in Stripe and mark the order as paid in the dashboard, but there version I have now from ~May of this year does not have this disconnect.
3. The order confirmed email gets sent as soon as the customer clicks on pay to head to the Stripe checkout experience whereas before the inventory was not deducted and the order not confirmed until the payment was successful.

I've been spending some hours trying to think through how to create the payment record from within the stripe callback in saleor-checkout-app, but it seems to be that nothing makes the checkoutId available to this app -- there is an orderId but the MutationCheckoutPaymentCreateArgs wants a checkoutId and not an orderId, so I am kind of at a loss for how to create the payment record and restore the stripe payment actions in the dashboard to capture or void an authorized payment. This is a blocker for me to be able to roll out the updated saleor and so I would love some additional guidance with respect to this.

I like the UI and checkout experience for the user better in this new flow, but as the store administrator this makes my work of managing the store and its inventory more complicated. Any help or guidance on this topic would be appreciated.

(Originally posted here but I think its buried and hasn't gotten any attention yet: saleor/saleor#10293 (comment))

[korycins]

Hey @matteius
Thanks a lot for your feedback ❤️
According to the point 2:
As you said there is a lack of information related to the transactions on dashboard side. We are aware of it and working hard to improve this part. Here you can find dashboard changes related to improving transactions on the dashboard side [work in progress]: saleor/saleor-dashboard#2233
Here you can also find the changes that we are going to introduce to core part for better handling the transaction flow [work in progress]: saleor/saleor#10350

[timuric]

The order confirmed email gets sent as soon as the customer clicks on pay to head to the Stripe checkout experience whereas before the inventory was not deducted and the order not confirmed until the payment was successful.

@matteius which webhook or email plugin are you using?

[matteius]

Stripe webhooks.

[timuric]

Perhaps you could use ORDER_UPDATED webhook and add custom condition when you want to send out email

[typeofweb]

RE 1: We're capturing automatically now with Stripe as it's the most common way of handling payments used by our customers. We understand this might not be ideal for every store, and we're planning to make it configurable in the future.

[korycins]

@matteius Ad3. One of the idea of transaction API was to give a developer as many flexibility as possible. One of this is a possibility to support different flow of handling payment. The old payment API only supports the flow "processing payment then order". The transactions API, allows you to build flow: "processing payment(s) then order" or "order then processing payment(s)" or "processing partial payment then order then processing partial payment".
Here you can find some charts: https://docs.saleor.io/docs/3.x/developer/checkout#case-creating-order-before-processing-payment, and https://docs.saleor.io/docs/3.x/developer/checkout#case-processing-payment-before-creating-an-order

Checkout app is using the flow "order then processing payment". If you have automaticallyConfirmAllNewOrders ref set to True, all new orders will by automatically marked as confirmed, which means that the event order-confirmed will be called.

This is something that we want to improve as well as better handling the stock(inventory) of unpaid orders (abandoned orders).
In the proposed changes, we always create order as an unconfirmed. Then if any transaction is attached, the order will be confirmed ( if automaticallyConfirmAllNewOrders set to true). For all unpaid order we will release the stock after exceeding the expiration time (provided by staff).
Here you can find more details: saleor/saleor#11257