Use case summary
Each checkout can fix the amount, let the customer enter it, or allow a lower amount on a second attempt. Limits bound what can be entered, and presets give one-tap shortcuts per currency. Result: donations and top-ups work without a custom form, and a payment that failed on insufficient funds gets a second chance.
- Payment Manager
Why a fixed amount does not fit every payment
Plenty of payments have no price that the business sets. A donation is whatever the donor decides. A wallet top-up is whatever the customer wants available. A partial settlement is whatever they can pay today.
Handling that in your own interface means building an amount field and everything around it: validation, currency handling, minimum and maximum bounds, and keeping the input inside the part of checkout that is safe to collect payment data in. Teams often avoid the work by publishing a separate payment link for each amount.
There is a second case that rarely gets designed for at all. When the amount asked exceeds what is available on the card, the payment fails, even though the customer had funds, just fewer than the checkout requested.
How to configure an editable amount
The amount behavior is a setting on each checkout, found in the checkout's Layout tab under the Payment section. Each checkout in your portfolio can behave differently.
- 1
Choose how the amount behaves
Three options: Strictly keeps the amount fixed as sent, Editable lets the customer change it, and Editable if insufficient allows a change only on a retry after a failure caused by insufficient funds.
- 2
Bound what can be entered
The Limits toggle sets the range a customer can move within. Worth checking these against your providers' own rules, since a limit that conflicts with a provider's can affect processing.
- 3
Offer presets instead of typing
Presets give one-tap shortcuts per currency. The defaults are +100, +500, and +1000, each adjustable or removable, and a chosen preset adds to the amount already in the field.
- 4
Give a short-funded customer a second chance
With Editable if insufficient, a customer whose first attempt failed for lack of funds can enter a smaller amount and complete the payment on the second attempt. Its presets default to −100, −500, and −1000. For this to work, the payment request needs a payment commits limit above one, set in its Processing tab.
- 5
Send payment requests with or without an amount
When you create a payment request, the amount field can be left blank, and the checkout's own default amount applies. The same checkout serves both a specific request and an open one.
- 6
Change it without development work
All of the above is configuration on the checkout. Adjusting limits, presets, or the amount mode does not involve your engineers.
What you get
Payments where the customer decides the amount work on the same checkout as everything else.
Donations and top-ups without a custom build
An open amount field with bounds and presets comes from checkout settings, so you are not building and maintaining an amount form, or publishing a separate payment link for every amount you want to offer.
Fewer lost payments on insufficient funds
A customer who cannot cover the requested amount can lower it and complete the payment, which converts a failed attempt into a smaller successful one rather than a customer who leaves.
Presets that guide the amount
One-tap shortcuts per currency let you suggest amounts rather than leaving customers to type a number, and the values are yours to set for each currency you accept.
Different behavior per checkout
One checkout can fix the amount for product purchases while another allows an open amount for donations, with no separate integration behind either.
Insufficient funds is the decline that keeps the customer
Across the payment industry, a declined transaction caused by insufficient funds is treated differently from every other failure because the card is valid, the account is in good standing, and the customer still intends to pay. Card networks classify it as a soft decline for that reason: the standard response is to try again rather than stop. The usual retry happens days later, once the balance has changed. Asking for a smaller amount during the same session is another way to resolve it, while the customer is still there.