The term “capture” (and variants like: “to capture,” “captured”) was replaced with “settlement” (and the equivalent variants like: “to settle,” “settled”) throughout the Payments documentation to better align the text with platform behavior.

The term “capture” is used in the market to refer to the moment in which a card payment is captured, as in the billing in the credit card invoice. In a card payment, the payment authorization happens first, which is when funds are reserved. After that, the capture of the reserved funds takes place, in other words, the amount transferred.

The settlement process on the VTEX side (Settle Payment endpoint) does not actually do a capture, i.e., it does not transfer the payment amount, but it does verify if the transfer was completed by the payment provider.

With other payment methods, like Pix or boleto (Brazilian offline payment method), the amount transfer happens in the platform, but it is not processed as a capture because the funds were not reserved during the authorization step. We are using the term “settlement” to encompass all these different scenarios, as well as to convey that our platform only verifies if the process was completed.

This replacement reflects the changes that were applied to the Developer Portal. For more information, check our release note about the update.

No action is required. It is only a change in the documentation. Nothing changed in how the platform works. You can continue your activities as usual.

There is more information available about how settlement works in Payments in the article Transaction flow in Payments.