“Incomplete Payment" notices in Stripe

Overview:

1) “Incomplete Payment” is a record of anyone that lands on your checkout page. It is set up this way so as to track "payment intent" which allows tracking of true "Abandoned Carts”.

2) The "abandoned cart" will trigger if the customer adds their email and doesn’t follow through with the rest of the checkout process.

These "Incomplete" entries are recorded even if the users are just visiting the checkout page. They are NOT actually attempted charges or re-charges.  

What is it?

In the new Stripe version (as of January 2023), you will most likely encounter payment entries marked as "Incomplete". Not to worry, this is to be expected. It means exactly what is says - the order was not completed and nothing was charged to the customer.

Explanation: 

Each time someone comes to your checkout and the Stripe Connect UI is loaded and shown to the visitor (like so - see screenshot below), it creates a "payment intent" within Stripe. This happens both on the System Store Checkout page - as well as any page where you have added the freestanding Checkout Widget. 

When no transaction is made, it leaves an "Incomplete" entry in your Stripe transaction list. Think of these "Incomplete" entries as simply "page loads" of your checkout page.  Again - they are NOT an attempted charge to a credit card. 

The reason that these payments are created is because of the transition from the legacy Stripe Elements to the newer PaymentElement. With the new PaymentElement, a "Payment Intent" must first be created before the element is displayed.

Note: If you have your checkout widget set to 1-step checkout - the Stripe UI is displayed immediately upon Page load - and thus you may have more "Incomplete" entries. If you have your checkout widget set to 2- or 3- step checkout - the Stripe UI will only display once the visitor has completed the fields on the first step, which may reduce your number of "Incomplete" entries. 

How To Make the Most of It:

While you can simply and safely disregard these "Incomplete" entries, you could also choose to use this opportunity to note who the User with the incomplete transaction is and indulge them to come back. You can click on the Incomplete payment and see the details in the metadata section. IF the User left their email address in the checkout, it will appear.

Use this to your advantage and offer them a discount code in order to tempt them to come back and finish their order.

You can also setup an Abandoned Cart Automation that picks up those left orders after a set amount of time and sends them a sequence of emails to reach an order completion. See this article for more details on setting up an Abandoned Cart Automation.