Hosted checkout
Cardflo's Hosted Checkout provides a secure and customisable payment experience for your customers. This solution offloads PCI compliance burdens while maintaining brand consistency.
It integrates seamlessly into your existing site, offering a reliable and efficient way to process transactions across multiple payment methods and acquirers.
- Category
- Checkout
- Capabilities
- 10
- Available on
- All plans
The overview
A hosted checkout serves as a PCI-compliant payment interface managed by a payment service provider rather than the merchant.
When a consumer initiates a transaction, they are redirected to a secure page hosted on the provider's infrastructure or presented with an overlay that captures sensitive card data.
This structure ensures that Primary Account Numbers and security codes never touch the merchant's servers, effectively reducing the PCI DSS assessment scope to the simplest level, typically SAQ A.
Beyond compliance, the hosted model integrates several critical layers of the payment stack, including 3D Secure 2. 0 authentication, fraud screening, and address verification.
It acts as the final intake point before the gateway routes the authorisation request to the relevant acquirer.
By decoupling the payment capture from the merchant's core application, businesses can update payment methods or security protocols without modifying their internal codebase, ensuring support for various schemes and alternative payment methods via a single integration point.
How it works
Initialisation and Session Management
The merchant server initiates a checkout session via a server-to-server API call. The payment service provider returns a unique session identifier and a secure URL.
This step ensures that the transaction context, including currency, amount, and order ID, is established in a controlled environment before the customer enters any sensitive payment details.
Secure Customer Redirection
The customer is redirected to the hosted environment or an embedded iframe. This interface is served directly from the provider’s PCI-certified infrastructure.
The merchant may customise the visual elements, such as colours and logos, via a configuration dashboard or CSS parameters to ensure the transition from the shop to the checkout remains cohesive.
Payment Data Capture
The customer enters their credentials, such as card details or digital wallet information. If required by PSD2 regulations, the hosted page triggers Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) through 3D Secure.
All sensitive data is tokenised immediately, ensuring the merchant only receives a non-sensitive reference for the transaction rather than the actual card numbers.
Authorisation and Settlement
The provider forwards the captured data to the acquirer for authorisation. Once the issuer approves or declines the transaction, the hosted page processes the result.
Upon completion, the customer is redirected back to the merchant's success or failure page, while a server-side webhook notifies the merchant's backend to update the order status.
Why it matters
Reduced Compliance Infrastructure Costs
Managing a fully PCI-certified environment requires significant investment in security monitoring, auditing, and infrastructure hardening. By utilising a hosted checkout, merchants offload the capture of cardholder data to the provider.
This typically allows the merchant to qualify for the most basic level of PCI compliance, minimising the administrative burden and technical risks associated with data breaches and regulatory fines.
Dynamic Payment Method Support
As the payments landscape evolves, supporting local alternative payment methods becomes essential for conversion. A hosted page allows for the remote activation of digital wallets, bank transfers, and Buy Now Pay Later options without requiring the merchant to rewrite their frontend code.
This flexibility enables rapid expansion into new geographic regions where specific local schemes may be preferred over traditional card networks.
Use cases
Global E-commerce Retailers
Merchants selling across multiple borders use hosted pages to automatically display local currencies and payment methods based on the customer's IP address or browser language settings.
Subscription-Based Services
Companies offering recurring billing utilise hosted checkouts to securely capture and tokenise payment details for future merchant-initiated transactions while ensuring initial SCA compliance.
SME Digital Transformation
Small businesses with limited technical resources deploy hosted pages to achieve a secure, professional payment experience without the need for an in-house security or development team.
By the numbers
This represents an industry-typical reduction in the number of security controls a merchant must personally manage when moving from direct API capture to a hosted model.
Merchants frequently observe improved conversion on mobile devices when moving to a responsive hosted page compared to legacy, non-optimised internal checkouts.
This is a standard timeframe for a technical team to implement a basic hosted redirect flow, which is generally faster than building a custom card-capture interface.
Related terms
Talk to our team about a live rollout on your acquiring stack.
What you get with Hosted checkout
- Minimise PCI DSS liability by hosting the payment capture form on certified external infrastructure.
- Support regional alternative payment methods through a single, unified integration and configuration interface.
- Automate SCA and 3D Secure workflows to ensure compliance with European PSD2 and PSD3 regulations.
- Customise the checkout UI with CSS to maintain brand consistency throughout the payment journey.
- Utilise responsive design to ensure the payment interface functions across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
- Integrate via simple redirect or embedded iframe to suit different technical and user experience requirements.
- Enable tokenisation at the point of entry to facilitate secure subsequent merchant-initiated transactions.
- Access real-time webhook notifications for immediate synchronisation of order status and payment capture events.
- Optimise conversion rates with localised languages and currency displays based on customer geo-location data.
- Manage fraud risks through integrated AVS and CVV checks performed at the point of entry.
A short scoping call, then a written plan for your MIDs.
Questions about Hosted checkout
How does a hosted checkout reduce my PCI DSS compliance burden?
PCI DSS compliance is mandatory for any entity that processes, stores, or transmits cardholder data. By using a hosted checkout, the merchant never handles the raw card data; instead, the data is entered directly into the provider's secure servers.
This often reduces the merchant's reporting requirement to the Self-Assessment Questionnaire A (SAQ A), which is significantly shorter and less complex than the requirements for merchants who capture card data on their own servers.
Can I maintain my brand identity on a page hosted by a third party?
Yes, most hosted checkouts allow for extensive visual customisation. Merchants can typically configure colours, fonts, headers, and logos to match their primary website.
Some providers allow for advanced customisation through CSS, ensuring that the transition from the merchant's catalogue to the payment page is visually unobtrusive and does not degrade customer trust during the final stages of the journey.
What happens if a customer’s payment fails on the hosted page?
When a payment is declined, the hosted checkout remains active, allowing the customer to attempt the transaction again with a different card or payment method. The page displays the refusal reason if provided by the issuer.
Once the customer either succeeds or decides to cancel, they are redirected back to the merchant’s site via predefined URLs, while a webhook sends the final status to the merchant’s backend.
Is a hosted checkout compatible with mobile applications?
Hosted checkouts are designed to be mobile-responsive. For native mobile applications, merchants often use a web-view to display the hosted page, or a mobile SDK that provides similar security benefits while appearing native.
This ensures that the payment flow remains secure and compliant regardless of whether the customer is using a browser or a dedicated retail application.
How does a hosted checkout handle Strong Customer Authentication?
The hosted page is built to orchestrate the 3D Secure (3DS) flow. When the transaction falls under the scope of SCA, the hosted page handles the redirect to the issuer's authentication page or displays the challenge within the session.
This managed approach simplifies the implementation of complex authentication protocols for the merchant, as the logic is maintained by the provider.
Can I use my own domain for the hosted checkout page?
Some providers offer a custom domain feature, allowing the hosted page to reside at a subdomain like payments. yourdomain.
com. This requires specific DNS configurations and SSL certificate management.
While this can improve user trust by keeping the domain consistent, many merchants find that a standard provider-hosted URL is sufficient given the clear branding available on the page itself.
Related features.
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