A payment method is a tokenised payment instrument — a card, bank account, or other payment type — belonging to an account. Shuttle never stores sensitive payment data; only gateway tokens and masked identifiers (like the last 4 digits of a card).

How Payment Methods Are Created

During checkout: when a customer pays through the hosted checkout, their payment details are tokenised and saved
Via the Create Payment API: pass card or bank details in the payment_method object and they're tokenised inline
Directly via this API: for advanced use cases like data migration or importing tokens from another system

Supported Types

Payment methods vary by gateway, but commonly include:

Cards: VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover, JCB, Diners
Bank accounts: ACH (US), SEPA (Europe), BACS (UK), BECS (Australia)
Wallets: PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay

Status Lifecycle

Status	Description
`ACTIVE`	Tokenised and available for use — last known state was working
`FAILING`	Tokenised and available but last payment attempt failed
`FAILED`	Automatically archived after repeated failures
`ARCHIVE`	Manually archived (soft deleted)
`EXPIRED`	Past its expiry date
`SINGLEUSE`	One-time token for a single payment, not saved
`REQAUTH`	Requires 3DS completion before it can be used

Gateway Groups

Some processors support payment method sharing across multiple gateway connections via gateway_group. When present, a payment method tokenised on one gateway can be used across any gateway that shares the same group. This is processor-specific.