We have a client that wants to do external transaction monitoring to generate alerts if there are any problems interfacing or receiving responses from the payment gateway. We're re-designing their e-commerce app; one of the problems the previous app had was they had a threadlock one night on their payment processing module and it cost them around $15k in sales until they realized it the next morning. So they want to submit test orders and monitor if there are any failures; they will be sending an order through their site using a test CC number, which will decline and an alert will be generated if that timeouts or doesn't come back with the right decline message. The monitoring will be from agents at 7 different locations on different backbones every 15 minutes, so 28 transactions/hour. That can quickly add up; at $.10/transaction that would be over $2k/month. I could have sworn I had heard or read that some payment gateways don't charge for declines, but I'm pulling a blank right now. Any ideas?

It is absolutely possible to send test transactions (to verify that the gateway system and/or interface to it) is working properly at no cost.

For instance, we have a transaction monitoring system that we built for one of the gateways that we work with and it tests the system every 60 seconds and pages our tech team if the proper response does not come back if it fails twice in a row... my thought is that you are looking for something along the same exact lines.

That being said - payment gateways typically charge when a live transaction is attempted. For instance, a live pre-auth, sales or credit return.

On the merchant account side, there is a hard cost incurred to the processor every time a live transaction is attempted - regardless of the approval or decline result. This is because the authorization network used will assess an authorization fee to the processor and the processor in turn passes it to the merchant.

Thus, my suggestion is to use a gateway that allows you to set a TEST flag and a TEST card # so that you can verify that the system is working without incurring any cost at all.

The other thing you could do is to run one test card # as a live trans perhaps once per hour or quarter-daily or something to that effect as a secondary monitoring backup.

But even easier, in lieu of the above - you could simply have your system monitor the live transaction momentum. If it sees that 0 sales have been processed in the DB within X amount of time, it could create an alert at that point for someone to investigate.

That way - you don't incur a bunch of cost when instead you could put in a monitoring system that doesn't gobble up trans cost.

Hopefully that info is helpful, let me know if I am understanding your needs correctly. Thanks!

Just to add a little bit - make sure that whatever gateway you do want to send a test transaction to - will not charge. I did contact one one time and they told me that they charge for every transaction - whether or not it is a test. I found this a little unsettling, but every gateway is a little different and they are also in the business to make money

There are some gateways that not charge you for Test and Decline transactions.