Stripe or Mercado Pago webhook not received

The customer paid, saw «payment approved», and the order is still «pending» in your system. It's almost always a webhook that never arrived, or one that arrived and failed. Here's how to tell which, the most common causes, code that answers it correctly, and how to find out before the customer writes to you.

1. What it looks like

The charge happens on Stripe or Mercado Pago. Your system learns about it through a webhook: a request they send to your server when the payment changes. If that request never arrives or your server answers with an error, this happens:

• In the Stripe or Mercado Pago dashboard, the payment is approved.
• In your system, the order is still pending: nobody ships it, no confirmation email goes out.
• Nothing crashes. No error on screen or in your logs, unless your code failed while receiving it.

You find out when the customer writes «I already paid, where's my order?». The rest of this guide is about finding out sooner.

2. Was it sent? Check the dashboard

First, find out whether the provider sent it and what your server answered. Both keep a history.

Stripe

• In Workbench, open the Webhooks tab, pick your endpoint and go to Events. Each delivery shows the status code your server returned.
• In live mode, Stripe retries for up to three days with exponential backoff. You can see when the next attempt is due right there.
• You can resend an event with the «Resend» button up to 15 days after it was created, or with the CLI up to 30 days: stripe events resend <event_id> --webhook-endpoint=<endpoint_id>.

Mercado Pago

• Go to Your integrations («Tus integraciones»), pick your application and open Webhooks.
• The notifications panel lists each delivery with its result (successful or failed), action, event and time. You can filter by status and date, and open each one to see the JSON that was sent.
• Mercado Pago waits 22 seconds for a 200 or 201. If it doesn't get one, it retries every 15 minutes; after the third attempt it spaces them out, but keeps going.

3. The most common causes

What the dashboard says points almost straight at the cause.

4. Answering it correctly

The rule is the same for both: verify the signature, answer fast, process afterwards. And log that it arrived, so you can look it up.

Stripe, with Express

// the untouched body ONLY on this route; express.json() goes after
app.post('/webhooks/stripe', express.raw({ type: 'application/json' }), (req, res) => {
  let event;
  try {
    event = stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(
      req.body, req.headers['stripe-signature'], process.env.STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('stripe webhook: bad signature', err.message);
    return res.sendStatus(400);
  }
  res.sendStatus(200);   // answer first
  handle(event).catch((err) => console.error('stripe webhook', event.id, err));
});

Mercado Pago, with Express

app.post('/webhooks/mercadopago', express.json(), (req, res) => {
  // check x-signature with your application's secret key (the official SDKs do it)
  if (!validSignature(req)) return res.sendStatus(401);
  res.sendStatus(200);   // within 22 seconds
  if (req.body.type !== 'payment') return;
  checkPayment(req.body.data.id).catch((err) => console.error('mp webhook', req.body.data.id, err));
});

async function checkPayment(id) {
  const r = await fetch(`https://api.mercadopago.com/v1/payments/${id}`, {
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.MP_ACCESS_TOKEN}` },
  });
  const payment = await r.json();
  // payment.status: approved, pending, rejected…  payment.external_reference: your order
  if (payment.status === 'approved') await markPaid(payment.external_reference);
}

Answering before processing has a cost: if handle fails, the provider won't retry, because you told it everything was fine. That's why the next step matters.

5. Don't rely on the webhook alone

The webhook is the fast path, not the only one. Two cheap backups:

• When the customer lands on your «thank you» page (success_url on Stripe, back_urls on Mercado Pago), check the payment yourself. If it's already approved, mark the order: don't wait for the webhook.
• A job every 15 minutes that finds orders «pending» for more than half an hour and asks for their status. On Stripe, the Checkout Session or PaymentIntent; on Mercado Pago, by external_reference.

6. Get alerted automatically

Everything above fixes the problem once you know it exists. What's missing is finding out the same day, not when the customer writes. The idea: record two moments and have something watch that the second one arrives.

• Open when the customer comes back with the payment approved: you know they paid.
• Close when your webhook has processed it.
• If 30 minutes pass without a close, something got lost in between.

With Estiaje it's two lines in your code:

// on your «thank you» page, when the payment comes back approved
estiaje.event('payment.approved_by_customer', { order_id, amount });

// in your webhook, once the order is marked paid
estiaje.outcome('payment.confirmed', { order_id });

And in the dashboard you declare what you expect, without touching any more code:

{
  "name":       "Payment approved → webhook processed",
  "when":       "payment.approved_by_customer",
  "expects":    "payment.confirmed",
  "match_by":   "attrs.order_id",
  "window_min": 30,
  "valor":      { "tipo": "atributo", "atributo": "amount" }
}

If an order is left without a close, your phone gets something like «$1,280 at risk: Payment approved → webhook processed», with the order that got stuck and, if you add a link to your system, a button to open it. If your webhook crashes, the error arrives grouped, with its stack trace and the order it left halfway.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: the webhook documentation from Stripe (docs.stripe.com/webhooks) and Mercado Pago (mercadopago.com.mx/developers), checked October 12, 2026.