Matt Turley, Continuum. Updated November 5, 2026.
For founders who can see the payment in Stripe but not the contact, deal or order in HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Pipedrive, Airtable or whatever stores their customers.
The payment and the CRM record are two separate events joined by code, and one hop silently failed. Trace one real paid order through three places: the Stripe event, your webhook handler logs and the CRM API response. The first place it stops is the cause, and usually the webhook did not run, the handler swallowed an error, or the CRM call was rejected.
Nothing connects a Stripe payment to your CRM except code that someone wrote. The chain has at least four hops: Stripe takes the payment, Stripe sends an event to your server, your server decides what the event means, and your server calls the CRM's API. Any hop can fail without the others noticing, and a failure in the last two usually produces no visible error at all.
The most dangerous version is the quiet one: the handler catches an error, logs it and returns success. Stripe sees a 200 and never retries, the customer has paid, and the only trace is a line in a log nobody reads.
Because it depends on a chain, the fix is rarely one line. It is making each hop observable, and then making the chain able to recover from a failure at any hop.
How to tell The CRM write happens on the checkout success page. Customers who pay and close the tab, lose connection or use a payment method that redirects elsewhere never reach it, so some orders are missing and the missing ones look random.
The fix Create the record from the server when Stripe confirms the payment (checkout.session.completed or the event for your flow). Keep the success page as a display only.
How to tell The payment is in Stripe, but the endpoint's delivery log shows no attempt, a redirect, a 401 or a 400. Our page on webhooks that do not fire covers each.
The fix Fix delivery first, then resend the failed events from the Stripe Dashboard so every paid order gets its record.
How to tell The handler has a try/catch that logs and returns 200. The delivery log is all green and the CRM is still missing records.
The fix Return a 5xx for failures you want retried, and write the unfinished work to a durable record (a database row marked pending) so it can be retried even after Stripe stops.
How to tell The CRM's API returns 401 (token expired or revoked), 400 (a required field is missing, a dropdown value does not exist, a phone number has the wrong format), 409 (the contact already exists) or 429 (rate limited). The handler never looks at the response.
The fix Check and log the response status and body for every CRM call. Refresh tokens before they expire, upsert by email instead of blindly creating, and respect rate limits with a retry.
How to tell Guest checkouts have no Stripe customer, the buyer used a different email than the one on your lead, or the metadata you expected is empty. The CRM write has nothing to match on and creates nothing or the wrong contact.
The fix Pass your own identifier when you create the checkout session (client_reference_id or metadata), and use it, plus a normalised email, to find or create the contact.
How to tell Some orders appear twice, others not at all. Stripe can deliver an event more than once, and a retry of a half-finished handler can repeat the side effects or skip them.
The fix Store the event id (or checkout session id) and make the whole handler idempotent: processing it twice has the same result as processing it once.
If it is one order, check whether the buyer used a different email and add the record by hand. If it is a pattern, and especially if orders have been missing for weeks, the fix is a redesign of how the handler works plus a backfill, and that is worth paying for because money and customer trust are involved.
A Ship Check reads the checkout, the webhook handler and the CRM integration together and ranks what will break first. If the chain needs rebuilding, a Ship Fix is the fixed-scope job that does it, and a Ship Check is credited against it.
Ship Check, $299: A senior engineer reads your codebase and sends a written verdict (fine, fixable or rewrite), what will break first, a security and data read, and a costed plan, within 48 hours of repo access or it is free. It has a 7-day money-back and is credited against a Ship Fix. Or: See Ship Fix, $4,000 to $15,000.