Payment Alerts — money captured with no order
When a customer pays but their phone drops before the order is made, the money is safe in your gateway. This page is how you close the gap.
5 min readUpdated 21 Oct 2026
In this guide
Why this page exists
Three layers try to make an order before you ever see an alert. The page only holds what all three missed.
- Normal pathBrowser returns, order created — nearly always
- Every 5 minutesWe re-check your gateway and create the order
- Payment AlertsWhat still cannot be matched — you decide
You will know: a red strip appears at the top of your Orders list and the Payment Alerts item in your sidebar carries a red count. Each alert shows the amount, the gateway, the payment reference and the customer's contact.
The money is not lost, and never was. It is sitting in your own gateway account exactly as any other payment does. This page is about getting your records right, not about recovering money.
Close it by creating the order (usually right)
Call or WhatsApp the customer first
When the payment carried their number, a WhatsApp customer button is on the alert. Confirm what they meant to buy — you have their money but not their basket, and guessing is how a wrong parcel gets sent.
Tap “+ Create order for this payment”
A short sheet explains what happens next; tap Continue to order form. The new-order form opens with their number already filled and the payment locked in. Add the items you just confirmed and save.
What you get
The order is created already marked paid through that gateway, with the payment reference attached — so stock comes down, your sales reports count it, and the GST invoice is raised exactly as for a normal sale. The alert closes itself and stays linked to the order.
If your order total does not match the captured amount, it still saves — with a warning on the order's timeline so the difference is visible later rather than silently absorbed.
Close it by dismissing — only for these five
Dismiss is for money that was genuinely handled somewhere else. Tap Dismiss…, pick a reason (and add a note if you like), then Dismiss alert — it is recorded:
| Reason | Use it when |
|---|---|
| I refunded the customer | You already sent the money back from your gateway's own dashboard |
| Duplicate payment | The customer paid twice and the real order exists against the other payment — refund this one first |
| Test payment | You or your staff made it while testing the shop |
| Settled outside | You billed and delivered this outside the website and it is in your other records |
| Other reason | Anything else — write the note so it makes sense to you in six months |
Dismissing does not refund anything. It only closes the alert in your records. If you meant to give the money back, refund it in your gateway dashboard first — we never move money out of your account.
Every closed alert stays visible in the page's History — marked Order created or Dismissed, with who closed it, when and why. A dismissed one can be put back with ↺ Re-open if you change your mind.
Making them rarer
Webhook setup is two minutes per gateway and lives in Manage → Settings → Payments → Advanced: Extra reliability layer. Razorpay and Zoho Payments register themselves. See Accept payments.
On CCAvenue there is no webhook at all — the five-minute check is the whole safety net, and it only runs if you have pasted CCAvenue's API access code and encryption key into the CCAvenue card (they are issued once CCAvenue registers our server address). Without them a customer who closes the tab becomes an alert on this page every time. Test now on the CCAvenue card tells you in one tap whether that automatic check is working.
Working the page well
Do this
- Clear the list the same day — a stranded payment is a customer waiting for a parcel
- Confirm the items with the customer before creating the order
- Refund in the gateway first if you are dismissing as refunded
- Add the webhooks once your shop gets busy
Not this
- Dismissing an alert to make the red count go away
- Creating an order from a guess about what they bought
- Assuming the money is missing — it is in your gateway account
- Making a second order for a customer who paid twice; refund one instead
Example · Healthio, a supplements store
Three customers paid ₹1,499, ₹2,250 and ₹899 by UPI and their phones dropped before they came back to the site, so no order existed. The alerts showed the amounts and their numbers; a WhatsApp each confirmed what they had ordered, three orders were created already paid, and all three parcels went out the same evening. Without the page, three customers would have been chasing an order nobody could find.
Related
| You want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| Understand the whole safety net | Accept payments |
| Create an order by hand | Create manual orders |
| Collect money on an order that is not paid | Payment links |
| See when money actually arrived | Managing orders |
Common questions
Is my customer's money stuck somewhere?
No. It is in your own gateway account, settling on the gateway's normal schedule, exactly like every other payment. Only the order record is missing, and that is what this page fixes.
An alert disappeared before I touched it.
Good — the automatic recovery matched it to an order, or the customer's browser finally came back. Alerts close themselves whenever the order shows up.
Can I refund from this page?
No. Refunds happen in your gateway's own dashboard because that is where your money is. Refund there, then dismiss the alert as refunded so your records agree.
Can staff close alerts?
Anyone with order access can — and every close is recorded with their name in the History and the activity log. See Activity log.
Why did the customer pay twice?
Usually a UPI payment that looked stuck, so they paid again. Checkout now watches for that and shows the confirmation instead of a second Pay button — but if both went through, one alert and one order is the normal shape. Refund the extra.
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