Payment gateways
A payment gateway is how money actually moves. Kontier issues the invoice and records the payment; the gateway is what charges the card or debits the account.
Which providers exist
The provider list is served by the platform rather than written down here, so it cannot go stale. Today two are connectable, Stripe and GoCardless, and the picker shows others as unavailable rather than hiding them.
Each provider declares what it can actually do: which payment method types, which currencies, which countries, and whether it supports off-session charging. That last one matters for subscriptions, because renewing a subscription is by definition a charge the customer is not present for.
Connecting one
Each provider asks for its own credential fields, and the ones marked secret are masked on every read afterwards. You can confirm a connection exists; you cannot read the key back out of Kontier.
Connect per workspace. A gateway connected in sandbox is not connected in live.
Verification proves reachability, not correctness
Verify probes the provider and stores the result, so you can see when a connection was last known good.
It does not disable a gateway that fails, and it cannot tell you the account behind the credentials is the one you meant. A gateway can verify successfully and still charge into somebody else's account.
How a gateway is chosen
When an invoice is charged, the provider is picked from the most specific preference available:
Code
A customer can also carry disabled_providers, which removes a
provider from consideration for them specifically. That is the mechanism for "this
customer's card issuer rejects that processor" without changing anything globally.
What the provider tells us
Gateways call back to report what happened: a charge succeeded, a debit bounced,
or a refund cleared. Those callbacks are what move an invoice to paid and what
start dunning when a payment fails.
This is inbound to Kontier and needs no configuration from you beyond the connection itself. It is the opposite direction from webhooks, which are Kontier telling your system what happened.
Reference
| Topic | When you need it |
|---|---|
| Payments | What happens once money arrives |
| Dunning | What happens when it does not |
| Wallets | Charging a prepaid balance instead of a gateway |
| Payment gateways API | Connect, verify and manage a connection |