Payments

Getting paid is great. Being able to control how you get paid is even better. Facilitating transactions and capturing payments are as flexible as any other aspect of the platform. Take control of your checkout process and drive purchases by offering customers a variety of payment options. Whether you are seeking to build out your own checkout flow or use Swell's hosted checkout, we support a diverse mix of payment gateways, capture flows, and the ability to define your own custom payment methods.

While Swell supports guest checkout by default with the guest=true flag, customers who have created accounts within your store will be able to access their saved payment methods, credit balances, and correct pricing for their account group. Once signed in, the session and cart will be tied to the user's account id—allowing them to apply any gift card balance they may have, use a saved payment method, or add a new one.

Charges can also be initiated directly through the API or dashboard. This provides a way to facilitate a purchase on behalf of customers without requiring them to go through a checkout process.

See the account model.

Along with saving payment methods like a credit card or PayPal account, Swell also provides the means for adding store credits to an account. Credits can be added in the dashboard, via gift cards, or directly to the balance field on the account. For example, you could implement a rewards program where purchases generate account credits at a nominal rate.

Swell supports applying gift cards to a user's account balance for use during a transaction. Gift cards operate in two ways: they can either be applied to an account (on account.balance) or redeemed during checkout towards the order total.

With your store, you have multiple options for checkout implementation, payment gateways, and support for multiple currencies.

Included with all Swell stores, our hosted checkout works for both subscriptions and one-time purchases. It supports multiple payment methods, including credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and Klarna. You can use any of our supported payment gateways to process transactions. This solution requires minimal configuration and allows you to start selling immediately.

Swell also supports the implementation of custom checkout flows with Swell.js—which can be used to render stripe elements, PayPal and other checkout buttons, and custom components. Custom checkouts can also use Swell to tokenize credit card information for saving customers' payment methods. Utilizing the Backend API in conjunction with Swell.js opens more flexibility for implementing custom checkout flow solutions such as splitting payments into vendor payouts or providing unique offers based on customer groups.

Along with the default authentication options for payment methods, Swell provides the ability to define a custom authentication URL from within the dashboard under Settings > Payments. Enable and input the custom authentication URL by selecting Edit settings and expanding the Advanced settings from within the payment gateway window.

Swell provides a vault for storing encrypted credit card information. This allows customers to use any of their saved cards during checkout and enables recurring billing with any payment gateway that supports vaulted cards. When using Swell's hosted checkout, cards are tokenized and stored in our vault. Tokens are stored on customer accounts as billing.card.token. Once stored, you can switch payment gateways without customers needing to re-enter their payment information.

const response = await swell.card.createToken({
  number: '4242 4242 4242 4242',
  exp_month: 1,
  exp_year: 2099,
  cvc: 321,
  // Note: some payment gateways may require a Swell `account_id` and `billing` for card verification (Braintree)
  account_id: '5c15505200c7d14d851e510f',
  billing: {
    address1: '1 Main Dr.',
    zip: 90210
    // Other standard billing fields optional
  }
})

All payment flows run through Swell—this refers to payments and refunds for both subscriptions and one-time purchases. Depending on the gateway and method, payments will either go through an authorization stage before being captured or be captured immediately.

There are four payment status values within Swell:

Support for multiple currencies is managed from the dashboard under Payments settings. Your store's default currency is denoted as the base currency. When adding multiple currencies, there are two modes that determine how they are displayed and used in checkouts:

When rendering currencies through Swell.js, display currencies will be shown with type=display, while priced currencies will show type=priced.