Secure epayments hsbc errors

[feemish]

I have had HSBC secure epayments set up on actinic since v7.
I'm now on v10.0.4 which has been working fine for over 8 months.
So its been working without error for years.

However twice in the last month the 'callback' has failed.
( I think thats what you call it )
The payment has gone through but the order has remained in 'pending psp'

So the order does not get done, and I get a dusgruntled customer asking whats going on.. and, because Epayments has worked fine for thousands of orders, and I've trusted it... I've looked at actinic and seen the order in pending psp, so I've told the customer payment didnt go through.. They then get back to me and say the moneys gone from their account.. and when I log on to the secure epayments page to check indeed it has !!
So I look very unprofessional !

As I say the secure epayments link has worked without error for years.
But this has happened twice in the last month.
I'm now increasingly worried that I'm taking payments but not sending out the orders..

Has anyone else had this with secure epayments?
Can anyone shed any light on what might be going on?
and how I can fix this and regain some confidence in the integration?

I know people have had this issue with paypal but it seems to be spreading.

Thanks.

[feemish]

Its happened again..
another order sitting in pending psp and the payment went through.

As I said above I've been using secure epayments for years with no problems... but now cracks are appearing.. every couple of weeks an odd payment goes through on hsbc but the order stays in pending psp.

Everything is set up ok... 99% of orders work correctly... going into 'pending' but every now and then one misses the call back and stays in pending psp.

How can I track this fault ? Or is it something that happens due to the nature of the callback over the internet.. do people just 'live with it' or not experience this issue?

If I didnt reconcile my actinic sales with the merchant account in the detail I do, I wouldnt notice these payments..

[Mike Hughes]

I'm sure we've discussed this kind of thing before. I'm not sure there was a definitive answer but I think the main culprit we were looking at was the email server.

It all sounds a bit illogical but as far as I can remember (and I really am a bit vague on this): If the email server is busy and times-out when sending the customer email this prevents Actinic from correctly processing the callback for that customer.

I seem to remember the conclusion was that Actinic ought to change the order of the conditions as yes, the customer email does depend on the callback being received, but the creation of the payment file should not be dependent on the email being sent.

It might be worthwhile checking your error logs for smtp errors.

Mike

[feemish]

thanks for the reply Mike, I'll look into smtp errors.

[feemish]

my error log only seems to have the last 300 errors, but none of them are smtp errors... theyre all missing files.

[Mike Hughes]

I believe it's the same problem Actinic refer to here:

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=44842

I think Actinic were considering fixing the problem in V11 but I have no clue whether it was included in the end or not.

Mike

[feemish]

thanks for that Mike.

I've had a look at the error.err file in the actinic folder.

There are only two smtp errors...
but they are not even in the same month as the callback failures.
The errors say :
Error returned from SMTP server (1: 435 Unable to authenticate at present

Does this mean that the smtp problem is not responsible for the callback failure?

[Mike Hughes]

I don't know.

The problem is that without any indication of what's causing an error it's just guesswork based on known problems.

The best thing in your case is to keep your eye open for this to happen and to contact the customer asking them if they noticed anything strange during their transaction.

It could also be worth contacting HSBC / Global Solutions or whatever they're called now and seeing if they have any error logs regarding the affected transactions.

Mike

[feemish]

thanks for your help..

from previous experience contacting hsbc merchant services about this will probably be a waste of time. I've raised a support ticket with actinic, I'll see what they say.

Regarding my server... I dont really think the problem lies there.. there is a lot of headroom in both bandwidth and cpu.

[feemish]

contacted hsbc secure epayments.
The guy said that for the payment to complete the call back must happen. So he is adamant that the call back was sent to the returning URL.

[Mike Hughes]

I guess no-one here is in a position to argue with the HSBC guy.

So, if he's right the callback is happening to your site (?) which suggests the problem is that somewhere between there and order completion the scripts are failing. AFAIK the only known problem that fits that is the STMP server issue.

I have used a (?) in there because I don't know what route the callback is taking. I believe the payment handover goes via actinics servers as SSL is required. It could be that the callback does the same thing rather than going directly to your server.

In which case it could be worth checking with Actinic if they keep logs of all the transactions and whether they have any visibility of errors in your problematic ones.

Mike

[feemish]

>>I guess no-one here is in a position to argue with the HSBC guy.<<

>>I believe the payment handover goes via actinics servers as SSL is required.<<
Interesting.

I imagine I would see some error in my server logs or in the actinic error.err file if it was an error at my end.

>>In which case it could be worth checking with Actinic if they keep logs of all the transactions and whether they have any visibility of errors in your problematic ones.<<

I will certainly ask actinic support about this when they get around to replying to my support ticket.

Thanks Mike

[zentauri]

every couple of weeks an odd payment goes through on hsbc but the order stays in pending psp.

It almost doesn't happen to us. Maybe once or twice in the past, I even can't remember, it's that insignificant. I thought it odd at the time but never happened again (fingers crossed)

Even if you have double number of orders we have we should be getting it on our website once a month, if you are getting 4x number of orders we get, we should have it every couple of months but we don't. I have no clue really how it works but maybe it is a server issue?

[feemish]

thanks... I was wondering if other people had this issue.. and it seems they do.
but looks like you just 'live with it'
maybe I'm too fussy and should live with the odd order not completing correctly too.. but it goes against my ocd.

When customers contact us saying we've taken their money but not sent them an order I was at first dismissive... turns out they were right and we looked like idiots or crooks. This just happening once is one too many times for me.