Obviously I don’t know the details of Stripe or your particular transaction, but in general payment systems tend to be extremely eventually consistent. (This is

Obviously I don’t know the details of Stripe or your particular transaction, but in general payment systems tend to be extremely eventually consistent. (This is partly for historical reasons, and partly because they’re designed for robust interoperability and so fall back to resolving problems with phone calls between banks.) Payment providers generally have heuristics to mark transactions as successful when there’s a high chance they’ve been finalized, but unfortunately this sometimes fails. In theory the final arbiter is the court system, but obviously that also has its limitations, as you encountered. TLDR: It’s annoying, but I’m not sure any other provider would have actually done any better here.