How to react to Stripe PaymentIntent success webhook in frontend

Question

I'm updating a webapp to Stripes SCA ready flow with PaymentIntent.

So far I have working (on my local test server):

1. Generate Intent on frontend and pass secret to form
2. Use Elements to collect card into
3. Use handleCardPayment to create the charge

Now here's the part where I am unsure. The handleCardPayment responses all seem to indicate a succeeded event, but the documentation warns to not use this repsonse, but instead wait for the Webhook response and only then fulfill customer orders.

Step 5: Asynchronously fulfill the customer’s order

You can use the PaymentIntent returned by Stripe.js to provide immediate feedback to your customers when the payment completes on the client. However, your integration should not attempt to handle order fulfillment on the client side because it is possible for customers to leave the page after payment is complete but before the fulfillment process initiates. Instead, you will need to handle asynchronous events in order to be notified and drive fulfillment when the payment succeeds. Documentation

So far so good, I've set up test webhooks and tunneling through ngrok I can actually receive the paymentIntent from the Stripe webhook.

Now, my question comes at this point, where the Stripe documentation ends. How should I deal with the UI from the point of the "Pay" button being pressed, and how do I in the frontend detect that the webhook has been triggered?

I am wondering if I should poll my own server, which in turn retrieves a database result that indicated if the webhook for this order has been received? Or what is a reasonable way to deal with this, technically and from an UX perspective?

Any pointers?

Answer 1

I just implemented this, and I decided to poll my own server for the update and ask the user to wait. The webhook marks our internal representation as "paid", so we don't need to poll Stripe. If the webhook doesn't come within 30 seconds, we tell the user that it's ok to leave the page, and we'll email them the result.

Technically, these webhooks can take up to 7 days to come in, so that's why Stripe doesn't want you to have the user wait. In reality, it almost always comes in within 5 seconds, and I would rather just have the user wait and see a final confirmation in the same session.