An issue occasionally reported to our Helpdesk team concerns V12 Finance orders, where the customer's application has been approved by V12, but no corresponding web order ever downloads to Cloud POS.

We explain below what can cause this to happen:

As a customer proceeds through the e-commerce checkout and opts to pay with V12 Finance, the customer leaves our platform and moves onto V12's site to start their finance application;

At this point, our platform has assigned that order an ID number (note, this is not the same as a web order number). When the customer moves onto V12's platform, both our platform and V12 recognise that order by the same ID.

Where problems can arise is if the customer then clicks back in their browser to return to our checkout (for example, to change the deposit amount or repayment terms), before moving again to V12's site to proceed with their finance application.

Returning to our checkout causes a new ID number to be generated on our platform, but the V12 application retains the original ID which was assigned when the customer first moved onto their platform.

So, now we have a mismatch between the order ID on our platform, and the order ID assigned to the V12 finance application.

Whilst V12 are processing the application, the Citrus Store ecommerce platform keeps the customer's web order in a pending state.  Our system will check in with V12 every 5 minutes to look for status updates on pending applications. We will do this for 30 days from the order first being placed, so any referred finance applications have more than enough time to be processed by V12.  We will only finalise the order on our platform once we see that V12 have marked the order as 'awaiting fulfilment'.

However, because there is now a mismatch between the order ID we recognise, and the order ID V12 are using, our platform is looking for a status update on an order ID that doesn't exist on V12's platform.

As a result, the order will never finalise in the e-commerce database, because confirmation is never received that the order is awaiting fulfilment.  If an order does not finalise, then it will never download to Cloud POS, and the retailer will need to manually create the order.