Documentation

DeclinePilot for WooCommerce

Merchant-facing reference for requirements, setup, recovery behavior, privacy, and troubleshooting.

Pre-release documentation. DeclinePilot is in final marketplace submission preparation. Screens, wording, compatibility claims, and purchase/support routing may be updated before public launch.

Requirements

WordPress 7.0 or newer within the declared supported release lines.
WooCommerce 11.0 or newer within the declared supported release lines.
PHP 7.4 or newer.
Per-site activation on WordPress multisite; network-wide activation is intentionally blocked in the current release.
Automatic recovery requires WooCommerce Action Scheduler, the WooCommerce mailer, and at least one enabled online payment gateway that is not merchant-excluded.

What DeclinePilot does

DeclinePilot focuses on payment failures after a WooCommerce order exists. It maintains a current recovery queue, classifies supported failure evidence, provides next-action guidance, can send tracked recovery links, monitors aggregate gateway-health signals, and reports tracked recovered revenue.

Failure categories

Supported evidence can be normalized into categories including insufficient funds, authentication required, payment method needs correction, issuer/customer decline, fraud/risk block, gateway/service problem, store configuration problem, rate/velocity limit, duplicate-payment protection, and unclassified failure. When evidence is insufficient, the product is designed to remain uncertain rather than invent a diagnosis.

Next Best Action

Merchant action first — investigate the gateway or store before prompting another customer attempt.
High-value opportunity — prioritize an unusually valuable eligible order relative to the current risk pool.
Customer action needed — authentication, funding, or payment-method correction is likely required.
Recover now — the order is eligible and no stronger hold signal is present.
Wait before retry — delay outreach immediately after a failure.
Protected — a safety rule suppresses recovery.

Recovery flow

DeclinePilot recovery links send the shopper to WooCommerce's native Pay for order flow. DeclinePilot does not charge a customer's card itself and does not create a separate payment checkout.

Automatic recovery is disabled by default until the merchant completes readiness checks and explicitly enables it. Eligibility is re-evaluated before scheduled outreach.

Safety controls

Per-order message limits and per-customer rolling frequency caps.
Resend cooldowns and quiet hours in the store timezone.
Replacement-order and duplicate-payment protection.
Fraud/risk suppression.
Offline-payment and subscription-renewal exclusions.
Generation-based invalidation of stale scheduled work.

Recovery attribution

DeclinePilot distinguishes a tracked retry from a simple later-paid order. A link open is not enough. Retry-attributed recovery requires a valid tracked retry submission through WooCommerce followed by a paid outcome. This is tracked association, not a claim that one message was the sole cause of payment.

Gateway health

Gateway-health status compares recent failures with a prior baseline and can present Learning, Healthy, Degraded, or Critical. It is an operational signal and not an SLA or assertion that a provider is at fault.

Privacy and retention

DeclinePilot is designed as a local WooCommerce extension with no Rivenset-operated product analytics service in the current release. The plugin does not intentionally store card PANs, CVCs, payment tokens, API secret keys, or raw gateway payloads in its custom analytics tables.

Local event retention is merchant-configurable from 45 to 730 days, with a 180-day default. WordPress personal-data export/erasure integration is provided for DeclinePilot-held pseudonymous linkage.

Uninstall behavior

If the merchant enables the setting to delete DeclinePilot local data on uninstall, the plugin removes its custom event/risk tables, plugin settings/state, transients, and plugin-owned lock options. Operational metadata stored on WooCommerce orders is not currently bulk-deleted during uninstall; that metadata is designed not to contain copied raw customer email/name/address/card data.

Support

For support, use support@rivensetsoftware.com after this address is activated. Do not send card numbers, CVCs, API secret keys, payment tokens, customer passwords, or raw gateway payloads.

When possible, start with DeclinePilot's privacy-safe support bundle and the WooCommerce System Status report only if requested.

Compatibility notes

Advanced failure diagnosis depends on what a gateway exposes. Generic recovery can use WooCommerce order state, while gateway-specific intelligence should only be claimed for versions and flows that have been validated.

DeclinePilot uses WooCommerce order APIs and declares High-Performance Order Storage compatibility. Final public version support will follow the tested release matrix at launch.