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 (In the same way that you reconcile card payments on your epos system with the payments to your payment provider).

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: 

• 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.

On odd occasions a customer may be charged twice.  A common reason 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.  

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

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

• Search for the order on the website.   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.   This will give you contact details for the customer.  
  • You will most likely find the order in ORDERS - ABANDONED BASKETS.  
  • If a payment has been taken twice for an order (eg if a customer experienced an issue with the payment - eg pressed the back or refresh button,  and tried the payment a 2nd time) you may find the order in one of the order statuses in ORDER - ORDER.
• 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.
• 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 & cancel the order.  For mor details on cancelling an order see https://support.abcommerce.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008842378-Managing-Returns . 

Background checks with Global payments and Elavon

The website does a background check for such orders when processed through Global Payments (Realex) or Elavon's standard implementation (not Opayo) and generally displays a warning message on the dashboard when this happens. 

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

These errors will stay on the dashboard for a period of time (one week)

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.