Field notes
When the cart total and the capture are not the same sale
A Klang Valley fashion shop was settling a different ringgit amount than the one the buyer confirmed. The storefront was not broken. The capture rule was older than the cart.
The merchant’s finance lead sent us three days of orders and the matching settlement file. Cart totals looked tidy. Captures were short by a few ringgit on roughly one in twelve paid orders, always on sessions that had changed shipping after the first authorisation.
The storefront recalculated shipping when the buyer edited the address. The payment request did not. The gateway held the first amount. Fulfilment shipped against the second. Nobody had compared the two files in the same week.
We do not treat this as a ‘payment bug’ in the abstract. It is a path: cart, quote, authorise, recapture or not, then the order that warehouse sees. If those steps are owned by different teams, the application will still look healthy in each dashboard.
A useful test, before a campaign weekend, is to complete five live checkouts that change shipping or a coupon after the first payment screen, then read the capture — not the thank-you page.