Retries that double-charge look like reliability
A path that always returns success can still harm merchants when idempotency is theatre.
Payment teams often celebrate falling error rates after adding aggressive retries. Merchants notice something else: duplicate captures and confused refunds.
A reliability audit samples authorisation and capture pairs for the same merchant reference. If the second attempt cannot prove uniqueness, the path is optimistic, not resilient.
Document the key, the TTL, and the behaviour when the acquirer is slow rather than down. Silent success after a timeout is how doubles enter the ledger.
Fix ownership usually sits between platform and acquiring. Name both in the finding or the ticket never closes.