Payment Security & Data Privacy

MakerVera is designed to keep your members’ payment data safe and your transaction records reliable. This page explains the protections built into the billing system.

Payment Processing Reliability

When a member makes a purchase, MakerVera follows a multi-step process to ensure nothing is lost or duplicated:

Payment confirmation — Your makerspace’s payment provider sends a secure notification confirming the payment
Duplicate detection — If the same notification arrives twice (e.g., due to a network retry), MakerVera recognizes the duplicate and skips it automatically
Order fulfillment — The order is created, gift card generated, or donation recorded
Automatic retry — If fulfillment fails (e.g., a temporary database issue), the system retries up to 3 times. A donation that fails shows in the campaign’s Failed Webhook Events panel from its first failed attempt, and leaves it once an attempt succeeds. If the retries don’t fix it, an admin with donation management permission can retry it there (Failed Donation Webhooks). Other events are flagged for the MakerVera operations team
Confirmation — The member receives their order confirmation email

What This Means for You

No duplicate charges — A member will never be charged twice for the same purchase, even if there’s a network hiccup
No lost orders — Failed transactions are automatically retried and flagged if they can’t be resolved
Fast checkout — Payment confirmation happens asynchronously, so checkout pages respond immediately

When a member starts checkout more than once

Members sometimes start the same checkout twice: they press the button again, come back with the browser’s back button, refresh the page or open checkout in a second tab. MakerVera keeps one payment page open per purchase, so there is never a second page left waiting to be paid:

Same cart: the member gets the payment page they already had open. No second page is created.
Cart changed (a different quantity, plan, add-on, discount code or cover-fees choice): MakerVera closes the earlier payment page at your payment provider before it opens the new one. The earlier page can no longer be paid.
The earlier payment just went through: no new checkout starts. The member is taken to the confirmation for the payment they already made.
The earlier payment is still being confirmed, or can’t be checked right now: no new checkout starts. The member sees a short message asking them to wait a moment and check their email, or to try again in a minute.

The checkout button stays disabled, with a progress indicator, from the first press until the payment page opens, so a double click sends one request. If the member comes back from the payment page with the back button, the button works again.

This applies to store purchases, gift card purchases, store subscriptions, event and class registrations, membership signups, passes and donations by signed-in members. A member can have one membership or pass checkout open at a time: starting a pass checkout closes an open membership checkout, and the other way round. A purchase never closes another purchase’s page: an open store checkout and an open event registration stay separate. Donations made without signing in aren’t matched to earlier ones, because MakerVera can’t tell who made them.

If a member pays twice anyway

In rare cases, two payments for the same purchase still both go through, for example when two tabs are paid at almost the same moment. The first payment completes the purchase. The second is refunded in full automatically, from your makerspace’s payment account, and nothing is delivered for it. For a store subscription or a recurring donation, the second subscription is cancelled before the refund.

The member gets an email, in their language, saying they were refunded. A refund can take a few days to appear on their statement.
Everyone in your makerspace who can manage billing gets an email too.
Both the payment and its refund appear on Transactions.
If the email says Manual refund needed, the automatic refund could not be completed: refund it from Transactions or from your payment provider’s dashboard (see Refunds & Reversals).

A purchase that the member finished before starting the new checkout is a separate purchase and is never refunded this way. A second membership or pass payment is refunded the same way, because a member can hold only one at a time.

Data Privacy & Retention

MakerVera follows a strict data retention policy to minimize the personal information stored in your system. Personal data is automatically cleaned up on a scheduled basis — no manual action required.

What Data Is Collected

During checkout, your makerspace’s payment provider sends MakerVera the information needed to fulfill an order:

Data	Examples	Used For
Contact info	Email, name	Order confirmation emails, receipt records
Payment details	Amount, currency, payment method type	Financial reporting, refund processing
Order details	Items purchased, quantities	Inventory tracking, order history

MakerVera does not store credit card numbers, bank account details, or other sensitive payment credentials. That information stays with Stripe.

How Long Data Is Kept

Data Type	Retention Period	What Happens After
Checkout session details	24 hours (successful) / 14 days (failed)	Replaced with a non-identifying summary
Abandoned cart data	30 days	Scrubbed to item count only
Order customer info	365 days	Email is anonymized, name and notes are redacted
Donation donor info	365 days	Email is anonymized, name and message are redacted
Gift card recipient email	90 days after full redemption	Email is anonymized

How Anonymization Works

When personal data reaches the end of its retention period:

Email addresses are converted to a one-way hash — useful for analytics (e.g., “how many unique donors?”) but impossible to reverse back to an email address
Names and free-text fields (like admin notes or donor messages) are replaced with [REDACTED]
Financial data (amounts, currencies, item counts) is preserved for reporting

This process runs automatically every night. There is no action required from administrators.

Webhook Security

Your makerspace’s payment provider communicates with MakerVera through webhooks — secure HTTP callbacks that notify the system when payments are completed, subscriptions change, or refunds are issued.

How Webhooks Are Protected

Signature verification — Every incoming webhook is verified using a cryptographic signature from your makerspace’s payment provider. Requests that can’t be verified are rejected immediately.
Processed once — Your makerspace’s payment provider sometimes sends the same notification more than once. MakerVera recognizes the repeat and acts on each notification only once, so a repeat never creates a second order, membership change or refund.
Payload size limits — Webhook payloads larger than 256 KB are rejected to prevent abuse.
No public authentication — Webhook endpoints don’t use user login tokens. Security comes entirely from verifying the signature from your makerspace’s payment provider, which is the industry-standard approach.

Supported Webhook Events

MakerVera processes the following kinds of events from your makerspace’s payment provider:

Event	What It Triggers
Payment completed	Order creation, gift card generation, or donation recording
Payment failed	The order is not fulfilled; if a bank debit failed, the buyer is emailed
Checkout expired	The unfinished checkout is marked expired; nothing is charged
Subscription created / updated / cancelled	Membership status changes
Invoice paid / payment failed	Recurring payment tracking
Refund updated	Refund processing
Dispute opened	Dispute flagging
Payment account updated	Your payment connection’s status on the Payments page

Audit Trail

All billing operations are logged in MakerVera’s audit trail. This includes:

Order creation, updates, and cancellations
Donation recordings
Gift card generation and redemption
Webhook processing events (received, completed, failed)
Data retention operations (what was anonymized and when)

Personal information in audit logs is automatically masked — email addresses appear as r***@example.com and names are redacted.

For Administrators

Do I need to configure anything?

No. All payment security and data retention features are enabled by default. The system handles:

Webhook signature verification (configured when MakerVera set up the payment-provider integration)
Automatic PII cleanup on a nightly schedule
Duplicate payment detection
Failed transaction retry and alerting

Can I change retention periods?

Retention periods are set at the platform level to ensure consistent compliance across all makerspaces. If you have specific compliance requirements (e.g., shorter retention for GDPR), contact MakerVera support.

What if a webhook fails?

Failed webhooks are retried up to 3 times automatically. If all retries fail, the event is moved to a dead letter queue and an alert is triggered for the MakerVera operations team to investigate.

For a donation, the failed event also appears in the campaign’s Failed Webhook Events panel. An admin with donation management permission can click Retry there to record the donation from the original payment details your payment provider sent. Retrying never charges or refunds the donor. The payment details are kept for 14 days after the payment, so retry within that time (Failed Donation Webhooks).

For other events (orders, memberships, gift cards), no action is needed from makerspace administrators: the MakerVera operations team recovers them.