Why is my recharge pending?

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Symptoms

You completed checkout for a top-up, the payment page said success, and the wallet still shows the old balance. Or the wallet shows a banner saying a recharge is pending.

How long pending lasts

Most top-ups land in the wallet within seconds. The platform adds the funds as soon as the payment processor confirms the charge, usually a few hundred milliseconds after the redirect.

A recharge that stays pending past a minute is a problem. The two common causes are a delayed confirmation from the payment processor (usually resolves within minutes) or a 3D Secure / SCA challenge the card issuer requires before settling the charge.

Reconcile-on-redirect

When the customer is redirected back to the console after checkout, the console looks up the charge status directly and adds the funds to the wallet without waiting for the processor’s confirmation callback. This is a backstop, not the primary path, but it keeps user-perceived latency low. If the balance is still old when you land on Billing -> Wallet after checkout, one of the causes below applies.

When pending becomes failed

A pending recharge becomes payment_failed when the charge itself fails (declined card, expired card, insufficient funds, fraud hold). The wallet shows the failure with the reason; the customer’s email receives a notice.

For SCA challenges, the customer receives an email with a Complete payment link that opens the Pending recharges page in the console. Completing the challenge there finalizes the charge and adds the funds to the wallet. If the customer abandons the challenge, the charge is canceled after the processor’s timeout and the pending entry clears.

Manually re-trigger

You cannot replay the processor’s confirmation from the console, but you can:

Open the recovery page if the issue is SCA. From the wallet, click the Recharge pending banner and follow the prompt.
Retry the top-up from scratch if the previous attempt was canceled or failed. You are not double-charged: the failed charge is independent of a fresh one.

Still stuck?

If the wallet has been pending for more than ten minutes and the payment processor shows the charge as succeeded, contact support with the payment id (pi_…) and the X-Request-Id from the wallet page.