A webhook is the gateway telling your site a payment completed. When it fails, money moves and the order does not — it sits pending while the customer waits for a confirmation that never comes. The gateway keeps a delivery log showing every attempt and every failure, which makes this one of the more diagnosable problems once you know where to look.
Before you buy, one quick look
Read-only, and it usually confirms the diagnosis in a minute.
In Stripe go to Developers → Webhooks; in PayPal it is under Account Settings → Notifications. Open the endpoint and look at recent deliveries.
Failed attempts with an error code — that is this problem, and the error tells us a lot.
No endpoint configured at all — also this problem, and a simpler version.
PayPal / Stripe configuration & webhook repair
Payments succeed at the gateway but the site never finds out, so orders stay unpaid. We repair the webhook connection and reconcile the orders it missed.
- Full backup taken before we start
- If we can’t fix it, you get your money back
- We never ask for your own password
This or something else?
| Payments taken, orders stay pending | This fix covers it |
| Webhook log shows failed deliveries | This fix covers it |
| Payment declined at checkout | Payment gateway integration errors |
| Subscription renewals failing | Subscription renewal failure diagnosis |
| Refunds not reflecting on the site | This fix covers it |
What you are seeing
- Orders sitting in pending or on-hold after successful payment
- Customers reporting they paid but received no confirmation
- The gateway dashboard showing successful charges with no matching orders
- Refunds issued at the gateway not reflecting on the site
- Subscription renewals charging but not extending access
Common causes
- No webhook endpoint configured, or the wrong URL
- A security plugin or firewall blocking the gateway’s requests
- The endpoint pointing at an old domain after a migration
- Signature verification failing due to a mismatched secret
- The site returning an error to the webhook, so the gateway stops retrying
What we do
- Take a full backup before touching anything
- Read the gateway’s webhook delivery log to see exactly what is failing
- Verify the endpoint URL, events subscribed, and signing secret
- Identify anything blocking the incoming request, including security rules
- Repair the endpoint and confirm deliveries succeed
- Reconcile recent orders that the missed webhooks left in the wrong state
What is included
- Webhooks delivering successfully, verified in the gateway log
- Recent affected orders reconciled to the correct status
- A note on what was failing and for how long
- The pre-fix backup, kept for 30 days
Not included
- Reconciling months of historical orders — we quote that separately if needed
- Refunding or capturing payments on your behalf
- Building custom webhook handlers, which is development work
- Design changes or content work
Questions about this fix
How many orders are affected?
The gateway log tells us, and that number is in the note. Recent affected orders are reconciled as part of this fix. If it has been broken for months the reconciliation itself becomes a larger job and we quote it separately.
Did the customers get charged?
Yes, if the gateway shows a successful charge. That is what makes this urgent — you have their money and no order to fulfil, and they have no confirmation. Reconciling the orders is part of the fix.
Why did it break with no changes on my side?
Most often a migration, an SSL change, or a security plugin update that started blocking the gateway's IP. Webhooks are incoming requests, so anything that tightens what can reach your site can silently break them.
Will the gateway resend the missed ones?
Sometimes, for a limited window. Most gateways retry for a few hours or days then give up. Anything past that window has to be reconciled manually, which is why finding this early matters.
Can this fail intermittently rather than completely?
Yes — a webhook can succeed most of the time and fail under specific conditions, like a slow response from the site during high traffic. The delivery log shows this as a pattern rather than one clean failure, which is what we look for.
Related fixes
If this is the second time this year
A bad update breaking the site is a symptom of updates not being tested first. Care plans run every update on a staging clone before it reaches your live site, which is the actual fix for this happening again.
Your access, your rules
Create a separate admin account for us and delete it when we are done. For anything else, we get in touch and agree a method — never a form field on this site, never by reply to an email.
We back up first, always
Before anything is touched we take a full backup and keep it for 30 days. If a fix goes wrong, we put the site back exactly as it was.
If it is not what you bought
If the problem turns out smaller than what you ordered, we refund the difference. If it is bigger, we stop and send a quote before doing any extra work.
If we cannot fix it
You get back what we received. Diagnosis is on us — you only pay when the problem is actually solved. The payment processor takes its fee before the money reaches us, so we never hold it and it is not ours to return. That is true here as everywhere else.
If it comes back
Reply within seven days of delivery and we put it back on the bench at no cost. The fix is not finished until it holds.
What we are responsible for
If something goes wrong with a fix, our responsibility is limited to what you paid for it. We take a full backup first so mistakes can be undone, and we tell you before doing anything outside what you bought.