What happens if my payment fails at checkout?

A failed payment usually comes from one of three causes: a typo in card details, an issuer block on online or merchant-category-coded transactions, or insufficient available credit. Our checkout shows a clear error message identifying the likely cause and lets you retry without restarting the enrollment. If your card keeps failing, the most common fixes are calling your card issuer to authorize the transaction (issuer fraud filters sometimes flag online education payments as unusual), switching to a different card, or using PayPal as a fallback path.

The enrollment seat isn't reserved until the payment succeeds, so retrying right away has no penalty — there's no "hold" to lose. International cards occasionally require an additional verification step the issuer initiates (3-D Secure, app-based confirmation), which adds 30 seconds but resolves cleanly. If you're enrolling close to a court deadline and payment is consistently failing, contact our support team — we can sometimes accept payment over the phone or arrange an alternative path that avoids whatever's blocking the online flow.

Once payment goes through, you're enrolled and can start the course immediately. The system sends an enrollment confirmation email within a few seconds of successful payment, with a link to launch the first chapter directly. If multiple charges appear on your card after a flow that seemed to fail (sometimes the issuer authorizes the charge but the merchant interface doesn't receive confirmation in time), contact support — we can identify which charge corresponds to your enrollment and refund any duplicates within the same business day. Duplicate-charge scenarios are rare but they happen, and we resolve them quickly.