Why can't I view failed payment attempts in my ecommerce platform?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Merchants seek visibility into failed credit card payments and automated alerts when checkout attempts fail, not just when orders are created. One customer completed via PayPal; the store saw an abandoned cart but no failed payment details in the order timeline.

Support advises checking Abandoned Checkouts and expanding the three sections where the order timeline would be to view the specific card error. Live support can help locate these menus. Shopify Inbox (store chat), Abandoned Checkouts (uncompleted purchases), and Shopify Flow (automation with triggers/criteria) are key tools.

A proposed Flow (“Order created” + “Fully paid = true” → “Send internal email”) was tested and found insufficient, as it alerts after successful orders, missing customers who fail and never create an order. A “pre-order” or abandoned checkout/failed payment trigger is requested.

Update: No Flow trigger currently exists to notify on abandoned cart creation. Product is investigating adding this in a future Flow version; timeline unknown. Screenshots were shared illustrating the suggested Flow setup.

Interim ideas: prompt customers via banners or abandoned-cart emails to report failures; encourage account creation to capture contact info. Status: unresolved/ongoing. Another user asks for progress.

Summarized with AI on January 24. AI used: gpt-5.
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@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?