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

New Clients / 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

Ongoing Management 

Check the dashboard for incomplete payments warnings

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

• 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.
• The connection to the internet is dropped.

The website does a background check for such orders when processed through Realex, Elavon or Authipay and generally display a warning message on the dashboard when this happens. 

Check your dashboard daily for these errors.  Clicking on the the 'more details' link in the warning message will bring you into the abandoned basket for this uncompleted order.  

You should contact the customer to

• Confirm that you are completing the order for them (you will need to do this outside the website eg as you would process a telephone order) or if they no longer wish to place the order refund in your payment provider interface & cancel the order. 
• Check if the customer experienced any error messages (other than the common reasons above) and flag any new errors to the helpdesk.  Check if the customer saw an "Order confirmation" screen after making the payment. 

Reconcile orders with payments

Ensure you log into your online payment gateway(s) to view transactions on a regular basis. It is important that you reconcile all transactions against orders in abcommerce (In the same way that you reconcile card payments on your epos system with the payments in your payment provider).

• On odd occasions the incomplete order (where payment was taken but order did not complete) is not caught by the background checks which display an error on the dashboard. Where this happens see if you can trace the order by searching in abandoned baskets and orders.  Note the order number may be different.You can check by comparing the details provided on the transaction by your payment provider eg dates/times, customer name, amount. Handle this order outside the website.  
• On  odd occasions a customer may be charged twice.  A common reasons why this happens is that the customer makes a payment on an order but there is an issue (as detailed above eg customer pressing the back or refresh button on the payment screen) and the customer is not directed back to the website after the payment.  If the customer tries to complete the order again (attempting a second payment) there could be two payments for the same order.  The order number may be different on the two payments.

The order number may be different. This can happen for example where a mobile phone user's browser refreshes the page with the credit card details twice without you knowing so the website generates 2 order numbers for the transaction and the payment provider has one order number and the website has the other order number.  

When situations like this occur it is important that you contact the customer before they contact you.   When you talk to the customer get details of any error that they experienced, pass on any new errors to the helpdesk.