How do online stores alert owners about payment problems?

[slam_dunc]

Hi -

 

New to osC and trying to troubleshoot the installation on our client's site.

 

We found a payment processor problem, but only after we tested it ourselves.

 

My question is: How do other online stores find out that their store may not be working? Is there an automated way to be alerted that PayPal or your payment gateway isn't working on your site?

 

My thought was that most stores do two things:

1) they look for a stop in the flow of orders even when they are getting new account creations, signaling a problem with order creation/completion.

2) they have one or more people in the company regularly place test orders to find out whether there's a problem

 

Any insight or experience would be very much appreciated. I searched for similar topics and didn't find any, so if you know of this being posted/answered somewhere else, please direct me to that topic and forgive my post!

 

Thank you very much,

 

Duncan

[photofxplus]

I know PayPal sends back an IPN which holds all kind of stuff. The question would be - does it hold any error code??

 

If it did,, you could add in an email notification code if IPN['?'] == error_code..

[slam_dunc]

I know PayPal sends back an IPN which holds all kind of stuff. The question would be - does it hold any error code??

 

If it did,, you could add in an email notification code if IPN['?'] == error_code..

 

Thanks Lloyd - appreciate the quick response!

 

We get the PayPal IPN, which is unfortunately problematic as that it doesn't seem to include pertinent order information (e.g. item ordered, size, color, etc.). I'm sure it's on our end, but the client's been difficult to troubleshoot with.

 

If we figure something out, I'll post it here to help others out if they're in the same predicament.