Capture

Complete a previously authorised transaction by sending a capture request

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Card Present Gateway

If you want to access information about our in-store offering, you may check the API specifications here: In-store Transactions Overview

Capture is usually the second step of a transaction. While authorisation ensures the validity of a card and puts a temporary hold on the balance, capture completes the transaction from the merchant's perspective and triggers the money transfer between the issuer and acquirer.

Initiating a Capture

A capture can only be initiated for a successful authorisation, so, it requires you to provide the identifier of the transaction you are attempting to capture, along with a new unique identifier within that transaction for the capture operation. The only other mandatory property to initiate a capture is the amount to be captured.

Cards Connect allows various capture scenarios depending on the amount, which are:

  • Full Capture: The transaction might be captured exactly as the authorised amount, which is the usual case for most of the transactions.
  • Partial Capture: The merchant may decide to capture less than the authorised amount because of various operational reasons, such as fulfilling the order partially due to procurement issues. Partial capture is allowed to all merchants by default. When you decide to capture a transaction partially, after your request is accepted, Cards Connect automatically voids the remaining authorisation amount to release the hold on the cardholder's limit if the respective card scheme supports a partial reversal.
  • Over Capture: The merchant may capture more than the authorised amount, usually because of extra expenses incurred during the fulfillment or, additional usage of goods or services by the cardholder. Over-capture needs to be enabled explicitly at the merchant level and allowed within the limits also specified in the merchant configuration. Depending on the over-capture permission and the limit, Cards Connect either accepts the over-capture request or rejects it.
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Multiple Capture Attempts

Cards Connect does not allow multiple captures on a transaction. If a merchant tries to request a capture for a transaction that already has a capture on it, the system rejects the request with the respective error regardless of the capture amount.

In a case a merchant needs to capture more funds from a card, we advise the merchant to communicate with the cardholder to initiate a new authorisation.

Capture Response

A capture request in Cards Connect can be processed differently depending on the merchant configuration:

Synchronous Mode:

If the merchant is configured to process captures in synchronous mode, as soon as a capture API request is validated and accepted by Cards Connect, you receive a response with "Succeeded" outcome. Cards Connect then sends the capture request to the schemes and informs you about the actual result of the capture using the webhook notifications. Considering the capture operation is handled as an advice down the line, unless there's a technical problem, the operation result remains as Succeeded. In the unlikely case of a problem, the webhook notification returns the current state of the capture request as explained under the operational outcomes page.

Asynchronous Mode:

In certain cases a merchant might be configured to handle the capture as an asynchronous operation. In this mode, when Cards Connect receives an API request to capture a transaction it returns "Accepted" as the outcome. This outcome eventually gets updated with the response we receive from the issuer, which is expected to be successful considering the merchant is acting on an existing authorisation. Once we receive this response from the scheme, we update you with a webhook notification. You may treat the initial "Accepted" as a sign of success for the capture or wait for the webhook notification with the "Succeeded" outcome. However, if there's a specific need to check the actual outcome of the capture attempt you may use the Get Capture API.

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Declined or Failed Captures

Even though Cards Connect accepts a Capture request, this is not a guaranty of an approval from an issuer. In certain edge cases, the issuer may decline a Capture advice. In such a scenario, Cards Connect does not update the status of the transaction but because of the ambiguity caused by the declined Capture, it rejects your subsequent Capture and Refund operations for the transaction.

Retrieving the Details of a Capture

Cards Connect offers two ways of accessing the capture details. You may call the Get Capture API with specifying the transactionId as well as the captureId to fetch the details of a capture operation or you may call the same endpoint by passing just the transactionId.

GET transactions/c0e0e3aa-1cc2-4116-8146-5cf26efddcbf/captures/71be34f1-1f21-40d0-8e1e-3da479292f7c

{
  "capture": {
    "id": "71be34f1-1f21-40d0-8e1e-3da479292f7c",
    "amount": 100,
    "outcome": "Succeeded",
    "responseCode": "00",
    "responseDescription": "Approved or completed",
    "createdAt": "2025-08-22T00:11:42"
  },
  "transactionId": "c0e0e3aa-1cc2-4116-8146-5cf26efddcbf",
  "reconciliationId": "e8dd3707-0d8f-4dde-8691-dec639ba6f5e",
  "permittedActionHints": [
    "Refund"
  ]
}