Business Watchdog for WooCommerce

Business Watchdog watches the money side of a WooCommerce store. It compares the orders of your store with what your payment providers (Stripe, PayPal) really received and refunded, and warns you when they disagree: an order marked as paid without a charge, a charge without a paid order, a refund missing on one side, payments that keep failing.

This plugin is the connector for the Business Watchdog service. You need a Business Watchdog account (a subscription with a free trial) at business-watchdog.com. The plugin does nothing until you connect it to your account with a one-time code.

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

This plugin connects your store to the Business Watchdog service operated at https://business-watchdog.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.
• 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. No IP addresses, browser details or visitor identifiers.

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