PaymentSessionPending is not supported for credit card payment method?

Shopify Apps

Topic summary

Core issue: While implementing a credit card payment app with 3‑D Secure (3DS, an added cardholder authentication step), the 3DS flow can take long enough that Shopify begins retrying the payment before enrollment/authentication completes.

Attempted approach: On timeout, set the Payment Session to Pending and complete it later. Actual behavior: The API returns error “UNSUPPORTED_PAYMENT_METHOD — Pending is not supported for credit card payment methods.”

Documentation conflict: Shopify’s 3DS processing docs (processing overview, item #11) suggest that a credit card payment can be set to pending and later resolved or rejected. An error screenshot is provided.

Requests for clarification:

  • Is “Pending” truly unsupported for credit card methods with 3DS, or is this a misconfiguration/bug?
  • What is the correct pattern for handling long 3DS authentications?
  • Can the app configure the timeout window to prevent premature retries?

Status: Unresolved; awaiting guidance/official clarification.

Summarized with AI on January 2. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi,

We’re implementing our credit card payment app with 3DS, and the 3DS authenticate may takes long time and Shopify will start retry the payment before 3DS enrolment finish, so I’m thinking we can hit PaymentSessionPending when timeout, and process this transaction later, but I noticed we got the error code and message said:

UNSUPPORTED_PAYMENT_METHOD
Pending is not supported for credit card payment methods.

But the credit card 3DS process said we could set payment to pending then resolve or reject it later, please check the article with #11:

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/payments/processing-overview#credit-card-payments-with-3-d-secure

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lilyyang721_0-1711606052443.png1247×235 48.7 KB

Can anybody help to clarify it? or is there any way I can set the timeout mins by my side?