How to Test Stripe Webhooks Locally with the Stripe CLI
Use the Stripe CLI to forward webhook events to localhost, trigger test events, verify signatures, and check that your handler updates app state.
Your Stripe or Shopify dashboard says the payment succeeded. Your customer says nothing changed — no access, no credits, no plan upgrade. In between those two facts is where most SaaS support tickets, refund requests, and late-night pages come from: a webhook that fired but never finished the job, a background worker that silently failed, or a retry that should have happened and didn’t.
These guides are written for the moment that’s actually happening to you right now, not for a generic overview of how webhooks work. A customer paid and got nothing. Stripe’s dashboard shows “delivered” with no matching record in your database. An invoice cleared but the credits never landed. Each guide walks through what to check first, how to confirm what actually failed, and how to recover without doubling a charge or a credit grant.
They’re grouped into three areas: webhook troubleshooting for when something just broke, post-payment incident recovery for cleaning up after a specific customer was affected, and SaaS payment reliability for the monitoring, idempotency, and reconciliation practices that catch these failures before a customer has to report them.
If this is a pattern you keep finding after the fact instead of before, SendPromptly is built to catch it earlier.
Use the Stripe CLI to forward webhook events to localhost, trigger test events, verify signatures, and check that your handler updates app state.
Shopify shows an order was paid, but your app never applied fulfillment, access, credits, or another business effect. Here is how to debug it.
Reconcile Stripe subscriptions, invoices, and payments against your app database to find paid-but-not-applied failures before customers report them.
Stripe webhook signature verification fails when the raw body, endpoint secret, mode, or timestamp handling does not match what Stripe signed.
Your Stripe checkout succeeded and the checkout.session.completed event fired, but your app never provisioned access or updated the subscription. Here is where to look.
A customer paid and Stripe confirms it, but they have no access to the plan, features, or product they purchased. Here is how to diagnose what failed and fix it without a risky manual database edit.
Stripe's webhook logs show delivery. They do not show whether your app actually provisioned access, granted credits, or updated subscription state. This guide covers what real webhook monitoring looks like.
When a Stripe webhook event was delivered but not processed, replaying it is often the fastest fix. Here is how to do it safely without double-charging or double-provisioning customers.
Stripe confirms the invoice was paid, but your app never added the credits to the customer's account. Here is how to diagnose the failure, find the affected customers, and recover safely.