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Paymend specializes in recovery of payments that have already failed authorization. Whether a payment is consumer or merchant-initiated, one-time or recurring: when you receive a decline from your primary payment provider, simply re-route it to Paymend and we’ll take care of the rest. It is not always possible to recover a failed payment immediately. In these cases, merchants can safely leave the payment with Paymend, confident that it will be handled by a platform designed to maximize the chance of eventual approval. Our recovery engine evaluates each failed payment using a rich set of signals and dynamically selects the optimal recovery strategy. In certain scenarios, this means intentionally waiting before attempting the payment again. A common example is an insufficient funds decline: retrying immediately is unlikely to succeed, so Paymend schedules a retry for when we expect the cardholder to have available balance again.

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Pending payments

When Paymend requires additional time to process a payment, we respond to the payment creation request with a PENDING status. A PENDING status means:
  • The payment has been successfully created
  • No final authorization decision has been made yet
  • Paymend is actively managing recovery attempts
PENDING is always a temporary state. Without any further action from the merchant, the payment will eventually transition to one of the following final statuses:
  • AUTHORIZED
  • CAPTURED
  • FAILED
Paymend will never hold a payment in a non-terminal state indefinitely: we enforce a maximum recovery window for all payments. If recovery is not successful within this window, the payment is marked as FAILED and no further attempts are made. You can see the lifecycle for payments with Paymend here.

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Best practices for PENDING payments

While a payment is in PENDING state with Paymend, merchants may continue to attempt recovery outside of Paymend. To avoid conflicts or double charges, please follow these rules:
  1. Do not retry the same payment via Paymend while it remains in PENDING state.
  2. If circumstances change such that no further authorization attempts should be made for a PENDING payment (for example, the order is canceled or the consumer is successfully charged elsewhere), the payment with Paymend must be voided to prevent a double charge.
In the event of a race condition where Paymend has already recovered the payment, resulting in a temporary double charge, you must issue a refund.
Void a PENDING payment

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Webhooks

Merchants should rely on Paymend webhooks to receive real-time notifications when a payment’s status changes (for example, when a payment moves from PENDING to AUTHORIZED). This avoids the need to poll the query endpoint for updates. You can find more details on Paymend webhooks here. Payment status update via webhook

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Previous failure details

The more information you can provide about previous attempts to process a payment, the more effectively Paymend can recover it. Paymend supports a PreviousFailure object that allows you to pass details about earlier attempts and their failure reasons. This information helps route the payment onto the most effective recovery path more quickly.

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Integration checklist

To ensure your integration to Paymend is of the highest quality, ensure that you:
  • Subscribe to webhooks (link to webhooks docs)
  • Handle PENDING as a non-terminal state
  • Void PENDING payments if no further authorization attempts should be made
  • Provide PreviousFailure data where available