There are many questions on the Facebook group about how payments work with Funnel Buildr, so I wanted to go over the mechanism. Hopefully this will also give you an idea of how to troubleshoot if something doesn't seem to be working with your payment processor.

1. Funnel Buildr 2 Basket

When someone reaches the Funnel Buildr 2 checkout, it uses the Shopify basket. What that means is that everything that has been added to the Shopify basket will also be in the Funnel Buildr 2 basket. 

If you were to look at the Funnel Buildr 2 basket and the Shopify basket in separate tabs, you would see that the same items are in both. If that is not the case then you are not looking at the same session and may need to refresh your screen - or come out of incognito mode.

2. Funnel Buildr 2 Checkout

When you checkout with Funnel Buildr 2.0, anything that you sold them before payment will be in the basket. That will include any cross-sells or upsells or downsells or order-bumps that took place before payment.

3. Payment Authorization

In a normal situation if there are no upsells after payment, the card (or paypal) will be both authorized and charged. The payment will be a success or failure.

In the case where you are going to have one-click-upsells, when someone puts in their payment details and clicks Complete Order on the original checkout form, their card is authorized but not charged.

What does that mean? In simple terms, it means that Funnel Buildr 2 asks your payment processor if they are allowed to charge a certain amount on the customer's card. That amount is the amount of the original basket. The payment processor says yes or no. If it is a yes, then the customer continues to the next step in your funnel. If the processor says no, then the customer will either stay on the checkout page (usually) or go to a Shopify failure page.

It is important to remember, that at this point, the customer is NOT charged. Funnel Buildr 2 has asked - if we were to try and charge $x then would it go through?

4. Payment Captured

If the payment is authorized successfully then the customer goes to the next stage in your funnel - for example an upsell.

If the customer wants to buy the upsell, then Funnel Buildr 2 ups the amount that it will eventually charge. For technical reasons, it is not allowed to ask for authorization for the new higher amount - Trust me on this one!

Eventually the customer will reach the thank you page and their card will be charged for the full amount. At this point, the payment will either be a success or a failure. If it is a success then an order will be created. If it is a failure then the customer will see an error that their payment didn't go through and they should contact their bank to find out why.

5. Time Out

Sometimes, a customer will make a purchase and land on the upsell page. For whatever reason, they never reach the final thank you page. This could be because they don't read the upsell page. Or could be because the browser crashes or a milliard of other reasons.

In this case, their draft order is kept by Funnel Buildr 2 and after around 20 minutes, Funnel Buildr 2 tries to put through the payment. If it is successful then Shopify creates the order and the customer is charged. If it is not successful, then the customer can't be charged and therefore the order won't be created.

6. Debugging

In a perfect world, a customer's payment should always be captured if it has been authorized. In reality there are lots of reasons why this may not happen. The vast majority of payment systems keep a log of successes and errors. Stripe does and Bluesnap does. What you will be able to see here is if the payment was authorized and if the payment was captured. Then should be some reason for the success or failure of both steps. Often if the authorization is a failure, then a capture will not be attempted so you won't see that.

Obviously, the problem connected to failed payments is not connected to Funnel Buildr 2 alone, but to any software out there that tries to charge credit cards. And in the majority of cases there is little that Funnel Buildr 2 can do if there is a failed payment in order to help you.

The one situation where we may be able to help out, is where there is an authorization but no capture. This means that someone has made an order from the checkout, but their payment was never completed. If this is the case, then please be in touch with Funnel Buildr 2 support with full details.

Authorize: Funnel Buildr 2 asks a payment processor if in theory they will be allowed to charge the card

Capture: Funnel Buildr 2 asks a payment processor to charge the card