Every Sale Failing at Payment: Fixed in Hours

The problem

• Every checkout attempt failed at the payment step, so the store was open but earning nothing.
• Sale prices were also displaying incorrectly, which sent the initial investigation down the wrong path.
• No error pointed at a cause: the symptom appeared at checkout, the fault was somewhere else entirely.
• Every hour spent looking was an hour of lost orders.

How we found the cause

• Started from the logs rather than from guesses. The visible symptom was at checkout; the log entries were not.
• Isolated plugins one at a time until the faulty one was identified.
• Traced the actual origin: a Salesforce integration whose API access token had expired. With the token dead, the plugin failed in a way that surfaced as pricing and payment errors.

The fix

• Removed the faulty plugin to restore trading immediately: triage first, root cause second.
• Reinstated the Salesforce integration properly once payments were confirmed working, so the client did not lose the CRM sync in the process.
• Documented the fault, the fix and the root cause in a written report.

The result

• Payments restored within hours of being engaged.
• Salesforce integration returned to service rather than abandoned.
• Client received a written report explaining what failed and why, not just a closed ticket.

What this means for you

A failing checkout is not always a payment gateway problem. In this store the fault sat in a CRM integration that had nothing visibly to do with payments, and the wrong sale prices sent the first investigation the wrong way. Reading the logs before changing anything is what found it.

Any integration that talks to an outside service (a CRM, an accounting package, a shipping API) depends on credentials, and some of those credentials expire. When one lapses, the error can appear somewhere else in the store entirely. Knowing which plugins hold tokens, and when they need renewing, turns this kind of outage into a routine check.

Getting trading back and fixing the cause are two separate jobs. Removing the plugin restored sales; reinstating the integration properly afterwards meant the CRM sync was not sacrificed to get there.