Stripe payment link not working for buyers

A Stripe payment link carries its own price and set of fields, and Stripe shows them on its own page. Your site only points at it. When you change the price on your page and forget the link, the buyer reads one price on your page and sees another on Stripe's, and the second one is the amount they are asked to pay. A link made in test mode, or a copy kept from an old draft, can look close to the live one on a phone. You rarely catch the gap, because you click a link you already know, usually a bookmark.

• Does the price on the payment page match the price on the page the buyer came from?
• Is the link a live link, not one made in test mode or copied from an old draft?
• Does a country, shipping or tax field stop the buyer before the card form?
• Does the page the buyer lands on after paying open a real page of yours?

The buyer does not stay on your site once they press Buy. The payment page opens on Stripe's own domain, with its own layout, language and fields, and most of what you see on your page does not follow them there. On a phone, a social app's built-in browser can open that page with buttons clipped or the card field out of reach. The buyer then concludes that the site is broken, although the trouble started at the handoff, not at the card.

Test the handoff by pressing the button from the page itself, on a phone, signed out. If the payment page opens with the product name and price you expect, the handoff is fine. If it opens with a different name, a missing product image or a blank area where the form should be, the link is the problem. Do this check before every price change goes live.

Checkout flow testing

A payment link can ask for more than a card. Depending on how it was set up, it may collect a shipping address, a phone number or a tax number before the card step. A buyer from a country the link does not serve, or one whose address format the form rejects, sees a message next to a field and nowhere else. They cannot tell whether the problem is their address or your product, so they stop.

Check the fields in the link's setup, not in your memory of the form. Write down every field the buyer must fill in, and ask whether each one is needed for this product. A field that a digital download does not need is a stop sign for a buyer who only wants to pay. Keep only the fields the sale needs, and say why each one is there.

Some failures happen after a buyer presses Pay, and a test cannot finish them. A bank may ask for an extra check in its own app, and a buyer who leaves to approve it may not come back to your site. The page the buyer lands on after paying is a setting too, and a wrong address there sends a paid buyer to a page that is missing or belongs to someone else.

The test reaches the payment step, and that is where its answer ends. It shows the link, the price, the fields and the screen before payment. It cannot tell you whether a charge goes through, whether the bank asks for an extra check, or whether the return page works after a real payment. Check those with a purchase you make yourself, on a card you own, once the link is set.

A payment link is easy to replace and easy to forget. Each time you change a price, switch between test and live, or publish a new link, run the same buyers from your page to the payment step. Compare the price and the fields on each screen with the page they came from. You catch the mismatch before a buyer tells you which price they were shown.