Capture

For some payment methods, the payment is completed in two steps:

1. Authorisation – The payment details of the shopper are verified, and the funds are reserved.
2. Capture – The reserved funds are transferred from the shopper to your account. 

By default, payments are captured immediately after authorisation. For payment methods that support separate authorisation and capture, you can also capture the payment later, for example after the goods have been shipped. This allows you to cancel the payment in case of any issues with the shipment. 

To capture payments, you can use either:   

• Automatic capture – payments are captured automatically after authorisation. This is the default setting. You can optionally specify a delay between authorisation and automatic capture.
• Manual capture – capture each payment by making a request to the /capture endpoint, or by specifying captureDelayHours in your payment request.

Automatic capture

With automatic capture, payments are captured automatically, using the capture delay that you specify.

Capture delay

Capture delay is the time between payment authorisation and capture. By default, payments are captured immediately after authorisation. Setting up a delay between authorisation and capture allows you to cancel the authorisation, for example when it turns out that an item is out of stock.

To be able to change the capture settings, you need to have the Merchant admin role.

To change the capture delay:

1. Log in to your Customer Area.
2. Switch to your merchant account.
3. Go to  Settings > Account settings. 
4. In the Capture Delay drop-down menu, select the capture delay that you want to use. Possible values: 
   • immediate – Capture is performed immediately after authorisation.
   • [N] days –  Capture is performed N (between 1 and 7) days after authorisation. 
5. Select Submit.

Manual capture

With manual capture, you need to explicitly request a capture for each payment.

To be able to change the capture settings, you need to have the Merchant admin role.

To enable manual capture: 

1. Log in to your Customer Area.
2. Switch your merchant account.
3. Go to Settings > Account settings. 
4. In the Capture Delay  drop-down menu, select manual.
5. Click Submit.

Once you have enabled manual capture, you need to capture each payment by making a /capture request.

Alternatively, you can include in your payment request captureDelayHours, specifying a number of hours after which the payment will be captured.

For example, to have the payment captured two hours after authorisation, include in your payment request:

{
  "amount": {
    "currency": "EUR",
    "value": 1000
  },

  "captureDelayHours": 2,
...
}

Capture a payment

Make a POST request to the /capture endpoint, specifying: 

• merchantAccount: The name of your merchant account that is used to process the payment.
• modificationAmount: This must be the same as or, in case of a partial capture, less than the authorised amount.
• originalReference: The original pspReference of the payment that you want to capture. This reference is returned in the response to your payment request, and in the AUTHORISATION webhook event.
• reference:
  Optional
  Specifies a unique identifier for payment modification. The reference field is useful to tag a partial capture for future reconciliation.

{
   "merchantAccount":"YOUR_MERCHANT_ACCOUNT",
   "modificationAmount":{
      "value":500,
      "currency":"EUR"
   },
   "originalReference":"8313547924770610",
   "reference": "YOUR_UNIQUE_REFERENCE"
}

You will receive a /capture response containing: 

• pspReference: The PSP reference associated with this /capture request. Note that this is different from the PSP reference associated with the original payment request.

{
   "pspReference":"8825408195409505",
   "response":"[capture-received]"
}   

CAPTURE webhook

When we have processed your capture request, we send you a webhook event with:

• eventCode: CAPTURE.
• originalReference: the PSP reference of the authorization.
• pspReference: the PSP reference associated with the capture request.

• success: indicates whether the capture request was successful. Possible values:

  • true: the capture request is valid (for example, the authorization has not expired, and the balance is available) and has been submitted to the bank/third-party processor. In most cases, this means that the funds will be transferred to your account. In rare cases the card scheme can still reject the capture, and you will receive a CAPTURE_FAILED webhook.
  • false: the capture request failed. The webhook event includes a reason field with a short description of the problem. Review the reason, fix the issue if possible, and resubmit the capture request.

For more information about the included fields, see the CAPTURE webhook reference.

Partial capture

With some payment methods, you can also partially capture a payment. For partial captures, your account can be set to perform either:

• Single partial capture
• Multiple partial captures 

Single partial capture

For single partial captures, any unclaimed amount that is left over after partially capturing a payment is automatically cancelled. 

To partially capture a payment, specify the value that you want to capture in your call to the /capture endpoint (this must be smaller than the authorised value). 

Multiple partial captures

When your account is enabled for multiple partial captures, the unclaimed amount after an initial capture is not automatically cancelled.

This is necessary for some businesses models such as an ecommerce site where capture takes place upon shipment. If you have an order with multiple items to ship, each shipment would correlate to a partial capture. 

To enable multiple partial captures, contact our Support Team.

Failed capture

In rare cases, a capture fails even after you received a CAPTURE webhook with success: true. The successful webhook event means that we sent the request to the card scheme, but the scheme can still reject the request at this point. This can even happen a few days after you submitted the capture request.

Most of the time Adyen can fix the issue, so that you will eventually receive the funds. Sometimes, however, you need to take action yourself. To learn why a capture can fail and what, if anything, you need to do in each case, refer to Reasons for failed capture.

When a capture fails, we inform you of this with a webhook containing:

• eventCode: CAPTURE_FAILED
• originalReference: the pspReference of the authorization.
• pspReference: the pspReference of the capture request.

The webhook event contains the reason why the card scheme rejected the capture. You can also find the capture failure reason on the Payment details page in your Customer Area.

An overview of failed captures is available in your Payment accounting report.

Testing failed captures

In our test environment, you can check how your integration handles failed captures:

1. Make a card payment, specifying:

   • holderName: capture failed

   {
     "amount": {
       "currency": "EUR",
       "value": 500
     },
     "reference": "Capture failed test",
     "paymentMethod": {
       "type": "scheme",
       "encryptedCardNumber": "test_4111111111111111",
       "encryptedExpiryMonth": "test_03",
       "encryptedExpiryYear": "test_2030",
       "encryptedSecurityCode": "test_737",
       "holderName": "capture failed"
     },
     "returnUrl": "https://your-company.com/...",
     "merchantAccount": "YOUR_MERCHANT_ACCOUNT"
   }

2. Capture this payment, using either automatic or manual capture.

Once we have processed the capture request, we send you a CAPTURE_FAILED webhook event.

See also