Choose a checkout experience

Checkout Experience is the setting, on every payment gateway record, that decides what a customer sees when they pay and who ends up handling their card details. It is the single most consequential choice you make when connecting a gateway — get it right before you take a live payment, because it determines how much compliance obligation your own organisation carries.

The three checkout experiences

Experience	What the customer sees	Who handles the card details	Gateway fallback
Direct API	A payment form that belongs to ChargeOn, inside Salesforce	Your organisation — the card details pass through your Salesforce org	Supported
Hosted Fields	A payment form whose card boxes belong to the gateway, embedded in the ChargeOn page	The gateway — card numbers never pass through your Salesforce org	Not supported
Redirect	The gateway's own checkout page, away from Salesforce	The gateway, entirely	Not supported

None of the three is wrong. They trade off compliance scope against how much of the payment experience stays inside Salesforce:

• Direct API keeps everything on your own page, and it is the only option that supports gateway fallback — automatically retrying a declined card on a backup gateway. In exchange, your organisation takes on the highest compliance obligation, because card numbers genuinely reach your Salesforce org.
• Hosted Fields keeps the card form visually inside ChargeOn, but the boxes the customer types into belong to the gateway. Card numbers never reach your org, which meaningfully reduces your compliance scope — but a Hosted Fields gateway cannot participate in fallback, because the card was entered somewhere ChargeOn cannot re-use, and if the charge fails the customer has to start again.
• Redirect sends the customer away to the gateway's own checkout page entirely. The gateway handles everything, including the card details, so this carries the lowest compliance obligation for you. It cannot fall back to another gateway either, for the same reason as Hosted Fields.

The picklist only offers what a gateway actually implements

ChargeOn builds this list from what the selected gateway genuinely supports, so you cannot accidentally choose a mode that does not exist for it. Not every gateway offers all three — see the gateway reference for what a specific gateway supports.

How to choose

• Want gateway fallback? Only Direct API supports it. If resilience against a single gateway's outage matters more than minimising your compliance scope, choose Direct API and set up fallback gateways.
• Want the lowest compliance burden while keeping the payment experience inside Salesforce? Choose Hosted Fields, where the gateway offers it.
• Happy to send the customer to the gateway's own page? Redirect asks the least of your organisation, at the cost of keeping the customer on your Salesforce site.
• Switching Adyen, PayPal or Stripe to Direct API? These three default to their own hosted or redirect checkout. Moving one to Direct API needs you to tick Direct Card Mode Confirmed when you save the gateway record — an explicit acknowledgement that you are taking on the added compliance scope for a gateway that normally avoids it.
• Taking agent-keyed card payments over the phone or by mail (MOTO)? That needs Hosted Fields for almost every gateway — the one exception is Stripe, where turning on MOTO without Hosted Fields switches it to Direct API instead. Only enable MOTO where your gateway account actually supports it. Either way, the extra identity check on a card (3D Secure) is skipped for MOTO payments, because the cardholder is not present to complete it.

Hosted Fields needs a one-time setup step from whoever implemented ChargeOn

A Hosted Fields gateway loads the gateway's own script inside an iframe, and the browser blocks that script unless it has been explicitly allow-listed for your org (a Content Security Policy Trusted Site). This is not something you configure from the gateway record — ask whoever implemented ChargeOn to confirm it has been deployed for the gateway you are enabling. Without it, the card entry area shows blank instead of a form.

Changing the setting later

1. Open the payment gateway record.
2. Change Checkout Experience.
3. If you are moving Adyen, PayPal or Stripe to Direct API, tick Direct Card Mode Confirmed.
4. Click Save.

The change applies to new transactions from that point on — it does not alter anything already recorded. If you are switching a gateway also used for recurring payments, be aware that a plan already running keeps using whichever gateway and checkout experience it charged its first cycle on; changing the gateway record does not move an existing plan.