Why are my Shopify customers experiencing failed payment issues?

urbaneditions
Tourist
6 0 1

Hi all,

 

I had a customer use Shopify Inbox and tell me that "I'm trying to pay with a cc from the united states and it is not going through or telling me why it is not going through"

 

I could see he had an abandoned cart entry but that doesn't give any details of failed payment attempts. I suggested he used PayPal and he managed to complete the transaction. There is no record of failed payment attempts in the order timeline details.

 

Is there a way to see the error message causing this issue for him or to see whether other customers are having the same problems?

Andrew
Replies 13 (13)

Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

Hey there, @urbaneditions!

 

Thanks for reaching out to the Community with your payment error question! 

 

Good advice for your customer to try using PayPal to complete their transaction. In terms of seeing the payment error from the credit card the customer was using, you should be able to see the error by going to your abandoned carts, finding the order, and looking at the 3 expandable options that appear where the order timeline would be.

 

Expanding these menus should yield information about the payment method, along with the specific reason as to why the card didn't go through. If you need some assistance on seeing the error, or locating these expandable menus, you can contact our live support team at this link here and they should be able to guide you on finding the error. 

Let me know if you have any further questions! 

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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dimak5504
Tourist
9 0 4

Hi Imogen!

Appreciate the info you shared and I have a follow-up question. While the failed payment information is available in the Abandoned Carts section, I need an easier way to be notified when failed payments occur. 

I am hoping to automate this with a Flow and would love your help in identifying the Trigger + Criteria I would use to build this out. 

Thank you in advance!

Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

Hey there, @dimak5504. Thanks for joining in on the thread here!

You know, since Shopify Flow has become available to so many more merchants, I really should do some more digging into it, and using it in my own store. It's such a powerful tool, and the more you use it, the more you learn about what it's capable of doing.

 

I spent some time in my store digging through Triggers/Criterias and I think I may have found a really simple way for you to be notified of failed payments for orders. I'm going to attach a screenshot here of the Flow I was thinking of. 29-04-6072-99314.png

 

I started with 'order created', as this is going to check every new order that gets made in your shop.

From there, I set the Criteria to be 'Check if Fully Paid is Equal to True'. The reason why I selected this is because, most of the time, your orders are going to be paid in full at the point of creation. The only time it wouldn't be is if it's an order using installments, a draft order you've yet to invoice, or if the payment fails or needs to be manually captured. For many folks, the examples I provided here don't happen often enough for this flow to be impacted, so most folks would only be notified when a payment doesn't complete in full.

From there, I added a trigger of 'Send Internal Email'. Using this trigger, you can assign a specific internal email address to be notified when this flow is triggered. You get to select the email address, and also build the message/subject line of the email into the flow. 

If this Flow doesn't quite do the trick for you, there are other 'Criteria' that can be assigned to orders based on payment - however there is nothing specific to if payment failed or not. This could be a really good suggestion for the Flow Team to build, so I'll be sure to pass that off to them for feedback.

Do you mind me asking for a bit more information about your business? Do you find that you're running into failed payments often? I'd love to chat with you a bit about things!

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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dimak5504
Tourist
9 0 4

Imogen, thanks for looking into this. Though it's a good thought, the problem is that the "Order Created" trigger is not the correct one from my testing of this.

That is because when a customer payment method fails at checkout, they will likely try again and those that succeed eventually, trigger this flow BECAUSE an order is created. I am interested in finding the potential customers that tried their card a few times, failed, and then gave up. For them, no Order was created thus the trigger does not activate.

Here is the Flow by which I found this out:

dimak5504_0-1661796153094.png

Shopify needs to create a new trigger PRIOR to an order being created, IMO to help us follow up with those customers who's order does not go through. Thanks!

Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

@dimak5504 Good point! It's a little redundant of me to suggest a flow that triggers when the 'Order is Created', when we're really trying to get notified of the potential orders that don't get made due to failed payments. 


I'm going to do a bit more digging here and see what I can turn up. That Flow that you've provided there - was that something you had built within your own store, or something you had found elsewhere to be used as an example of what you'd like to see? 

 

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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dimak5504
Tourist
9 0 4

Something I built in my own store and tested for a week or so to see if it worked (which it didn't, lol).
If you can look into this and submit an enhancement request for a useful pre-order trigger, that would be wonderful.

Y'all already have the data since you're using Abandoned Cart notifications and such so I know its possible, just needs to be accessible via Flow.

Thanks!

Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

@dimak5504 Totally - the data is there for sure, it's just a matter of utilizing it in a flow setting. I'm curious about your flow. When you were testing, did your 'Order Transaction Created' Trigger not trigger any notifications for you at all? I suppose it depends on the timeline of how events occur - if the order is 'created' before the transaction is. The Abandoned Checkouts do have numbers assigned to them, but they're different then an order number. I'm going to do some digging and see if this data does already exist in some format that's pluggable into Flow, and I'll follow up with you.

Just a thought - if you're thinking about getting in touch with these customers that are having issues placing their orders, I wonder if having your customers make accounts to shop on your store would be helpful. This would have the customer provide an email to you that can be contacted, which is something that is sometimes missing from the 'Abandoned Carts'. Have you thought about this in the past?

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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dimak5504
Tourist
9 0 4

@Imogen in short the test was a success in that I did receive notifications when a failed transaction occurred but they were highly infrequent and the customer always ended up having a successful order process afterwards.

Given that we just moved from a different payment processor and I have 2 months worth of data, I know that these "failed" transactions should be occurring multiple times per day. This is simply not what I was seeing leading to the conclusion that the Flow was working as intended, only notifying me of successfully completed Orders.

We are trying to salvage "lost" sales due to a potential customer being frustrated that their payment method isn't being accepted, hence why this Flow would be useful. We don't even know that these folks are shopping and reaching out to every single Abandoned Cart person would be a big waste of time so we need a pinpointed trigger that will isolate those folks who literally tried making a purchase, meaning the conversion is effectively there.

Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

@dimak5504 Thanks for all the additional context here! Enjoying this conversation with you! I am speaking to some dev/flow folks currently about this and digging into some other info, too, so just letting you know I'm still plugging away at that.

In my experience, these failed checkouts aren't honestly that common, but you absolutely know your business best, especially when you have the data. I'm curious if the number of abandoned checkouts you had over that week of testing matches up with the number of notifications you were sent via flow. Did you have the chance to cross reference that?

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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dimak5504
Tourist
9 0 4

@Imogen appreciate you looking into it. I didn't get a chance to cross-reference the data but do have 2 months worth of data which has been highly consistent from week to week and the flow produced a tiny fraction of that amount so I knew it was off right away 🙂

 

Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

@dimak5504 Totally fair - I wish I could get you authenticated here in the Forums so I could scope things out myself, but we can't authenticate here so I can only dream. 😂

I'm doing some more digging in here, and I should have some info for you by the end of my work day (roughly 4 hours). I'll follow up before I'm gone for the day with any of the information I've found. Hoping I can get back to you with some good news!

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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Imogen
Shopify Staff
1482 182 268

Hey again, @dimak5504. Just following up!

 

I've done some digging and it looks like we have don't have a trigger currently built at this time that would be able to internally notify you when an abandoned cart is created. It looks like this has been a featured that's increased in popular in terms of requests, however, so our Product Team is looking into building this trigger into Flow. I can't comment on what the timeframe on that may be, but it'll likely come down the pipeline in a future version of the Flow App. 

I'm going to make the devs aware of this thread, so they can have another example of feedback on why such a trigger would be helpful.

 

In the meantime, perhaps you can include some wording in an announcement banner for your store, or in your abandoned carts emails (if you send these automatically) to ask customers who had failed transactions to reach out to let you know about them. It's not a solution, but this may help you with identifying and getting those potential customers to complete their purchases.

I was hoping I was going to be able to come back with some better info, but that is all I've got at this time. I appreciate you having this dialogue with me about the issue; it's going to ensure that some solid feedback gets passed along to the folks that need it.

Imogen | Social Care @ Shopify 
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Xardas
Shopify Partner
9 0 7

Hello, any success with this idea? i would love to be able to see this failed payment info and get notified as well in Shopify(or using Flow) and not only with the paayment processor. Cheers