#Handle Payments Failures

Here we review what Jason Fried said in How Do You Process Credit Card:

The one thing we’re often surprised by is how many accounts have charge issues so it’s important to really think about the error handling and customer experience issues related to declined cards.

So there are thousands of reasons a credit card may become declined after user register our website. It’s important to handle these payment failures.

Stripe also provide the test situation for us.

Card Number: 4000000000000341
Description: Attaching this card to a Customer object will succeed, but attempts to charge the customer will fail.

This special card number will create a customer but charge will fail.

We may produce failed webhook event by Stripe Dashboard.

Open Payments on dashboard and click Create Payment, input the above invalid Card Number info and click Done. Then we can find a failure charge in Events & Webhooks.

As the previous post, we can get failed data as :event_data for test:

spec/requests/deactivate_user_with_payment_failure
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
describe 'customer on failed charge' do
  let(:event_data) do
    {
      "id" => "evt_15ycOeLCTUylKIRlJom1jayI",
      "created" => 1430718340,
      "livemode" => false,
      "type" => "charge.failed",
      "data" => {
        "object" => {
          "id" => "ch_15ycOdLCTUylKIRlq8G764Gc",
          "object" => "charge",
          "created" => 1430718339,
          "livemode" => false,
          "paid" => false,
          "status" => "failed",
          # .......
          "application_fee" => nil,
          "refunds" => {
            "object" => "list",
            "total_count" => 0,
            "has_more" => false,
            "url" => "/v1/charges/ch_15ycOdLCTUylKIRlq8G764Gc/refunds",
            "data" => []
          }
        }
      },
      "object" => "event",
      "pending_webhooks" => 1,
      "request" => "iar_6AyLkbPGvZltpn",
      "api_version" => "2015-04-07"
    }
  end
end

Notice that :event_data type is charge.failed.

Then we add event charge.failed in strip.rb

config/initializers/stripe.rb
1
2
3
4
5
6
StripeEvent.configure do |events|
  events.subscribe 'charge.failed' do |event|
    user = User.find_by(customer_token: event.data.object.customer)
    user.deactivate!
  end
end

We simplpy deactivate user here, usually, it should send a warning mail to the user.

Here is the request test:

spec/requests/deactivate_user_with_payment_failure
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
describe 'customer on failed charge' do
  let(:event_data) do
    #...
  end

  it 'deactivates a user with the webhook data from stripe for charge failed', vcr: true do
    user = Fabricate(:user, customer_token: "cus_6Awy7ItkTK5HCv", active: true)
    post '/stripe_events', event_data
    expect(user.reload).not_to be_active
  end
end

We need to add column active for User to store the status.

1
add_column :users, :active, :boolean, default: true

Make the active column default is true, otherwise Rails will set false for default value.

#A Short Conclusion for Stripe

We cover Stripe for last three weeks.

  • In week 6, we introduce Stripe for charge. How to build a custom form to charge. And test by using vcr for replay response.

  • In week 7, we refactor code into UserSignup, as an Service Object of OOP concept. And we need to use javascript driver webkit and selenium in RSpec because of Stripe api.

  • In week 8, we use Subscription to charge monthly instead of charge once. And we handle events by Webhook, to deal with charge.succeeded and charge.failed events.