--- title: Passing data with Payment Links slug: passing-data-with-payment-links published_at: 2022-12-14 15:00:26 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:52 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn the tools for passing data to and from Stripe with payment links. We'll cover the client_reference_id, embedding the Checkout Session ID in the return URL, and using UTM params for conversion tracking. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 01:00 Creating a Payment Link in the Stripe Dashboard 02:00 Adding a client reference id 03:04 Retrieving the checkout session id 06:50 Adding UTM parameters 07:48 Conclusion ### Resources UTM Codes https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links#utm-codes Confirmation behavior https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links#change-confirmation-behavior Prefill or track customer sessions https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links#url-parameters ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #nocode #stripe #lowcodenocode #payments tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, payment links, @cjav_dev, cjav_dev, client_reference_id, no-code payments, checkout_session_id, utm, utm params, query string params, query string, payment links query string, payment links data, passing data with payment links] views: 536 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/passing-data-with-payment-links youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI9gJakNLQ8 youtube_id: uI9gJakNLQ8 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/uI9gJakNLQ8 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uI9gJakNLQ8/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Passing data with Payment Links *Published: December 14, 2022* *Views: 536* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI9gJakNLQ8) [![Passing data with Payment Links](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uI9gJakNLQ8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI9gJakNLQ8) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn the tools for passing data to and from Stripe with payment links. We'll cover the client_reference_id, embedding the Checkout Session ID in the return URL, and using UTM params for conversion tracking. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 01:00 Creating a Payment Link in the Stripe Dashboard 02:00 Adding a client reference id 03:04 Retrieving the checkout session id 06:50 Adding UTM parameters 07:48 Conclusion ### Resources UTM Codes https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links#utm-codes Confirmation behavior https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links#change-confirmation-behavior Prefill or track customer sessions https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-links#url-parameters ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #nocode #stripe #lowcodenocode #payments ## Transcript what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about the three tools that you have for passing data with your payment link through the payment process for your customer so that you can either keep track of what campaign they're in or what User it's for and those three tools are number one the client reference ID this is a query string parameter that you can add directly to the payment link it could be any custom ID we'll look at look at how to do that number two you can pass UTM params so you're tracking maybe what campaign they were in or perhaps like what source they came from did they come from Twitter or another social media or maybe one of your you know your email campaigns so you can embed those UTM params and finally we'll look at how you can update your confirmation page and your redirect for a payment link to include the checkout session ID and that ID will have reference to the checkout session and all of the order details foreign by creating a brand new payment link I'm in the stripe dashboard you can head over to stripe.com and sign up for an account if you don't already have one we're going to use this product called a book it's ten dollars USD one time and it is a this is so this is going to be a very basic payment link we're not going to enable any other Advanced options and we're just going to create this simple payment link with a single product for ten dollars now that we have this link we can copy it and if we go directly to the link with no query string parameters at all you'll notice that we're brought to this checkout page and we're prompted and asked to pay this ten dollars I'm already authenticated with link so I can just pay uh one time and click this button it's going to complete the purchase now at this point we haven't actually passed through any data so we don't know anything about where the person found this link or any reference back to the original user and we just get this thank you page and we would need to go into our stripe dashboard and look and see sort of uh try to figure out who bought this book that we just sold an alternative is to add a query string parameter the first we're going to add is a client underscore reference underscore ID now this could be any ID that ties the session back to your existing user so this might be sort of like one or you know 9000 or whatever you know you might have some uuid in your database that relates back to the custom your your user but I'm just going to put my Dash customer Dash ID that's going to be the client reference ID notice that I'm putting this after the query string and this is a query string parameter if I wanted more query string parameters I would separate those with an ampersand so this is our first sort of key and value pair that we're adding into the query string now again we're redirected through checkout The Experience looks very similar the customer is not going to see anything different however now that we have completed the process what we could do is take the ID of the checkout session which conveniently happens to be in the URL there and we could come back over and look at our logs for the developer and actually in fact let's look at the events and we'll notice that there was a web hook event that fired called checkout session completed so we could build automations inside of zapier or other tools for handling no code fulfillment where we're going to listen for this webhook event and you'll notice that the client reference ID is embedded inside of the checkout session object similarly if you have a server running that's listening for these webhook events you can re-retrieve the checkout session so I could say maybe stripe checkout sessions retrieve and here I'm going to pass in that checkout session ID that I got back and here I can refetch and see the client reference ID so this is the client reference ID now you might be wondering where do I get that checkout session ID so let's talk about that next so by default this checkout session object is created for you sort of under the hood by payment links and by default there's really no way to access that so what we need to do is we have to go inside of our configuration for our payment link so we're going to go back to our payment link here and we're going to say edit and on our confirmation page what we want to do is say we want to redirect customers to your website so I'm going to say https cgab.dev and that means that after a customer completes the flow they're going to be redirected to this page instead of showing them sort of this thank you page here after they complete the process but if you click on this little um in more information hover you'll notice that you can include the checkout session in the redirect URL that means that this URL that we're defining here can have its own sort of checkout session embedded in it now we can embed that any way we want we just have to put in the open curly brace and then in all caps check out underscore session underscore ID and then close curly brace and typically folks will put this inside of the query string but it could be in the path it could be elsewhere so you might say this is the the ID equals or maybe checkout check out session ID equals this so now when we redirect this checkout session ID this is this is right now hard coded into this redirect URL that we're setting this will be replaced with that ID for the checkout session so that on our thank you page we can re-retrieve the checkout session and display whatever we want about the about the checkout session so I'm going to say update the link here let's copy it we'll go through one more time so we're going to click on on that payment link we're redirected through now when we click on pay instead of seeing that default thank you page we're going to be redirected to our brand new redirect URL so now we are redirected to cjav.dev slash and now we have our checkout session ID query string parameter and that includes the ID of the checkout session so if we wanted to we could Implement a page here that re-retrieves this checkout session so here we go so we've got our checkout session ID we copied it from the URL we're pasting it in here that's the same now when we hit enter you'll notice that because we did not include a client reference ID the client reference ID is null so we could sort of combine those two concepts right so let's grab our payment link we're going to copy it and say that our client reference ID is my customer ID and now when we go through the checkout flow we're redirected back to our new page we can grab that checkout session ID and we can say strive checkout out sessions retrieve paste in our checkout session ID and now we should see our client reference ID is set to my customer ID so now what we've got going on is we have two tools we have our client reference ID that we're going to set as the query string parameter on the payment link before we redirect and then second we have this checkout session ID that's embedded in the URL that the customers ultimately redirected to now is there something that we can add that will pass through in both cases and the answer is yes so we're going to use UTM params for that so if you go over to the documentation you can search for this track using track campaigns using UTM params and there are five different parameters that are supported so UTM Source content medium term and campaign so let's grab this UTM source and play around with this for a second so we're going to say UTM Source maybe the source was Twitter and the UTM campaign maybe it was for hacktoberfest or something I don't know and then when we hit enter this UTM source and campaign will be passed all the way through to our redirect URL so now when we click on pay what we can do is associate these checkout sessions and sort of confirmations back to a specific source and campaign so now we can see that in the query string we have our UTM source of Twitter and the UTM campaign of hacktoberfest thanks so much for watching hopefully this was helpful please let us know in the comments below if you like videos like this one and also let us know how you're using payment links we'd love to know your use case and if there's anything missing from the API that you'd like to see thanks again and we'll see you next time foreign [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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