Managing Your Payment Provider

Below are some guidelines for managing your payment provider. It's important to note that all payment and refund transactions are managed via your Payment Provider and any queries relating to payments should be directed to your Payment Provider

Prior to go-live please ensure you can log into your online payment gateway and view transactions that have been processed. Ensure you can part or fully refund the card used in the transaction in the case where an order or part of an order cannot be fulfilled

Reconcile orders with payments

Ensure you log into your online payment gateway(s) [eg Elavon, Global Payments, Authipay, Paypal, Humm] to view transactions on a regular basis. It is important that you reconcile payments against orders on the website.

Why do we need to reconcile orders with payments?

As the user gets transferred to an external system to make a payment, on some occasions, a user may make a payment but does not get returned successfully to the website so the order is not completed. Common reason for these happening are: 

• The connection to the internet is dropped.
• With 3D Secure, the bank can take a long time to process the credit card details and approve the order.  The customer is then left waiting a long time after submitting their credit card details so they click BACK or REFRESH their page - which breaks the processing of the credit card details.

We recommend that you reconcile order total with payment totals on a daily basis to ensure that any inconsistencies are caught.

Background checks

Stripe, Authipay, Global Payments (Realex) and Elavon's standard implementation (not their Opayo solution) all provide us payment details in the background which enables us to display a warning message on the dashboard when there is a payment but the order has not completed.   You will see these errors at the top of the dashboard

Click into the "VIEW ERRORS NOW" link to see details of errors and alerts

Make sure that the customer did not place a 2nd order when they experience the issue.

You can complete these orders and move them to NEW ORDER status by clicking on the "Change to COMPLETED and move to NEW ORDER now" button.

Clicking on the 'View Order Details' link in the warning message will bring you into the abandoned basket for this uncompleted order.  

Check your dashboard daily for these errors.  

We suggest that you still reconcile payments with order totals as this background check may will not catch every payment which doesn't have a valid order.

What to do if a payment has been taken but the order has not completed

• Check for "Incomplete Order messages on the dashboard.  If you are using Authipay, Elavon's standard solution or Global payment, the order may be displayed on your dashboard as an "Incomplete Order".  If the order has been flagged as an "Incomplete Order" on your dashboard then you can contact the customer and click the "Change to COMPLETED and move to NEW ORDER now" button.
• Search for the order on the website.   If the order has not generated a "Incomplete Order" message on the dashboard you can also check by comparing the details provided on the transaction by your payment provider eg dates/times, customer name, amount.  The order number may be different.   
  • You will generally find the order in ORDERS - ABANDONED BASKETS.  
  • If the order has not been flagged on our dashboard as a "Incomplete Order" then you will not be able to convert this pending basket to an order so you will need to process the order outside the website (eg as you would process a telephone order) or if they no longer wish to place the order cancel/refund in your payment provider interface.

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• Get details from the customer about their experience. Let them know that you see that there may have been an issue completing the order. 
  • Ask if they pressed the back or refresh button on the payment page or if their internet connection is flaky (Known causes of this issue)
  • Check if the customer saw an "Order confirmation" screen after making the payment. 
  • Get details of any error that they experienced, pass on any new errors to the helpdesk (other than the common reasons above - eg customer pressing back or refresh button or flaky internet).   If they had a screen grab of the error, this would be really helpful.