Thanks for being a part of WWDC25!

How did we do? We’d love to know your thoughts on this year’s conference. Take the survey here

Not receiving App Store Server Notifications for failed transactions

We are currently integrating In-App Purchases for our app and have configured App Store Server Notifications (v2) in the Sandbox environment.

During testing, we observed the following issue:

  • When a transaction is cancelled, declined, or pending (e.g., Ask to Buy flows or authorization pending),

  • No App Store Server Notification is sent to our webhook endpoint.

  • We only receive webhook events where the status is "purchased".

This becomes a critical problem for us because our backend must accurately track transaction states including failed and pending purchases, especially for wallet top-up use cases.

Additionally, we tried mocking failed transactions (via Xcode local environment and turning off In-App Purchases from Developer Settings) to simulate a technical failure scenario.

Even in these cases, no webhook notification was received when the purchase failed server-side.

  • Is it expected behavior in Sandbox that only successful transactions ("purchased") trigger webhooks?

  • Are failed or pending transactions suppressed in Sandbox intentionally?

  • Will webhook behavior be different in Production (i.e., will we receive webhook notifications for failures there)?

  • Is there any extra configuration or entitlement needed to fully test failure scenarios via webhooks in Sandbox?

Not receiving App Store Server Notifications for failed transactions
 
 
Q