About this plugin
Requires a Business Watchdog account. The plugin connects your store to the Business Watchdog service and does nothing on its own. Create a free account (14 days free, no card) — or simply click Connect to Business Watchdog after activating the plugin: you sign in or create the account, confirm the store and come back to WordPress connected.
See Installation.
Does any of this sound familiar?
- A customer paid, but the order is still “pending payment” in WooCommerce — and nobody ships it.
- Stripe or PayPal received the money, but there is no matching order in your store.
- WooCommerce says one amount, Stripe or PayPal captured another.
- A refund was made in PayPal, but WooCommerce still shows the order as fully paid — or the other way round.
- Card payments started failing an hour ago, and you find out from an angry customer the next day.
These problems are silent. WooCommerce does not warn you, and the payment provider’s dashboard does not know what your store expects. Business Watchdog watches both sides and tells you when they disagree — by e-mail or Telegram, with the order, the amounts and what to check.
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What Business Watchdog finds
- Paid, but the order stayed unpaid — the provider captured the money, the store never marked the order as paid.
- Marked as paid, but no money — the order is marked paid in the store, but the provider has no capture for it.
- Payments without an order — money arrived at Stripe or PayPal that belongs to no order of your store.
- Wrong amounts — partial or double captures, overpayments, orders changed after payment.
- Refund problems — a refund recorded on one side only, or a cancelled order that was paid and never refunded.
- Failing payments — one payment method suddenly fails again and again at checkout.
An “all fine” is shown only when the data really says so: if a provider is not connected or data is outdated, Business Watchdog says “unknown” instead of hiding the gap.
Try it without risk
- Free storefront check, no sign-up: enter your store address at business-watchdog.com/en/check-store and see whether your public checkout path works.
- 14 days free, no card: create an account, connect your store and Stripe or PayPal, and see the results on your real orders.
- It only reads: the plugin never changes orders. Stripe is connected with a read-only key; for PayPal, which cannot issue read-only access, Business Watchdog calls only reading methods from a fixed list and blocks every other request.
- Nothing changes for your customers: the plugin never takes part in payment or order creation, and your store keeps working if the service is unreachable.
- Easy to stop: one click on “Stop monitoring” or deactivate the plugin.
How it works
This plugin is the connector for the Business Watchdog service. com — the trial is free. The plugin does nothing until you connect it to your account with a one-time code.
Stripe and PayPal are connected in your Business Watchdog account, not in WordPress.
Prefer not to install a plugin? You can also connect a store without installing anything: Business Watchdog reads orders through the WooCommerce REST API with a read-only key, and WooCommerce’s own webhooks make it instant. The plugin adds what a key cannot:
- Order and refund changes are sent the moment they happen, also on WooCommerce versions where the REST API notices refunds late.
- Payment attempts at checkout are counted per payment method, so repeated failures of one method are noticed early.
- Optional checkout observation: on the checkout and order-received pages a small script counts whether the payment form was shown and whether placing the order worked. It reports only to your own site; your customers’ browsers never contact Business Watchdog.
- The service’s own browser checks of your checkout are recognised and never counted as customers.
The plugin never takes part in payment, order creation, stock or store e-mails, and nothing calls Business Watchdog while a customer is on your site. If the service is unreachable, your store keeps working; changes wait in a local queue.
Emergency stop
- WooCommerce → Business Watchdog → Stop monitoring, or deactivate the plugin.
- WP-CLI: wp business-watchdog stop.
- define( 'BUSINESS_WATCHDOG_DISABLED', true ); in wp-config.php stops the plugin before any of its code runs.
External services
com. Nothing is sent before you connect the plugin with a pairing code from your Business Watchdog account; disconnecting or deactivating the plugin stops all sending.
What is sent, when connected:
- When you connect: the one-time pairing code, your site address, a random installation ID and the plugin version. With Connect to Business Watchdog your browser first opens business-watchdog.com with your site address, the address of this plugin’s return page in your admin, your WordPress language and two one-time random values; you then sign in there and come back. The secret part of the check stays in your WordPress database until the final exchange.
- Links to business-watchdog.com in the plugin: when you click one, the service counts the click with the place of the link and your WordPress language for its connection statistics. Nothing about your store, orders or visitors; the plugin itself sends nothing in the background before it is connected.
- Order and refund changes, as they happen and in a daily check: order ID and number, status, currency, total, payment method ID and display name, the payment provider’s transaction reference, the date the order was marked paid; for refunds the amount, the provider’s refund reference and the order they belong to. No customer names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers or order items are sent.
- Every 5 minutes (heartbeat): plugin version and the state of the local queue.
- When versions change: the versions of WordPress, WooCommerce, the active theme and active plugins, and whether HPOS and the block checkout are used — to tell you when an update coincides with a problem.
- Every few minutes: counts of payment attempts per payment method and outcome, and — only if checkout observation is enabled for your store — counts of checkout stages per 5-minute window.
- Every 5 minutes, only if checkout statistics are part of your plan: counts per 5-minute window of add-to-cart actions, checkout page views, checkout submissions, created orders, JavaScript errors and 4xx/5xx responses of cart and checkout requests, also split into browser family, operating system family, device type and browser language. The plugin derives these four attributes on your server from each request and keeps only the counts; groups of fewer than 5 are merged into «other» before sending, so no small group can be worked out. No IP addresses, full browser strings, visitor identifiers, cookies or individual visits are recorded or sent.
The service processes this data on your behalf as a processor under a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR) on servers in Germany.
- Terms of Service: https://business-watchdog.com/en/terms
- Privacy Policy: https://business-watchdog.com/en/privacy