Three ways digital delivery quietly loses a paying customer

The symptom

A buyer who genuinely paid never receives their product, or disputes a charge claiming non-delivery, and there's no clean record to settle the question either way.

The three ways this breaks

• Triggering delivery from a browser reaching a thank-you page rather than from the payment webhook. Browsers close mid-transaction, and a delivery mechanism depending on that round trip will eventually fail someone who genuinely paid.
• Delivering the asset as an email attachment. This loses both the delivery record (no log of whether it arrived) and the consumption signal (no way to know whether it was opened).
• Not logging every download or open event with a timestamp, buyer address and order ID. That log is the difference between a defensible dispute and a lost one when a buyer later claims they never received anything.

The fix

Trigger delivery exclusively from the payment webhook, with the handler built to be idempotent against retried events. Deliver through a signed link rather than an attachment, on the confirmation screen immediately and by email within about a minute. Log every download or open event, with timestamp, buyer address and order ID, as a standing practice rather than something built only after a dispute happens.

How to spot it

Check what event currently triggers your delivery: if it's a browser reaching a thank-you page rather than a payment-provider webhook, that's the first gap. Check whether your delivery email sends the file as an attachment; if so, replace it with a signed link. Check whether you have a download log with a timestamp per purchase; if not, build one before your next dispute arrives, not after.