I've spent the last couple weeks playing around with the sandbox eCommerce API to possibly integrate into a client's website. I have quite a bit of experience with other payment APIs, however our client already has Clover POS devices at their retail locations so it seemed logical to try to integrate the Clover API using their existing Clover account vs another vendor, so that we can eventually integrate their POS hardware as well.
Unfortunately, our experience thus far, to be quite frank, has been pretty terrible. The eCommerce sandbox API is constantly throwing errors. I'm regularly seeing error 500 (internal server error), error 503 (service unavailable), error 504 (gateway time-out), error 400 (bad request, but then the message is "Error connecting to payment gateway. Please try again later"), and other weirdness. I can understand the occasional downtime, but these errors are happening on a frighteningly regular basis, and have been happening for the entire time that I've been evaluating the API.
I've been a web developer for over a decade and have used many APIs over the years, but honestly, I've never used an API that throws as many transient errors as Clover's API does. If my client didn't already have Clover POS hardware, I would have already abandoned it. This just doesn't seem acceptable for something as vitally important as a payment gateway.. we simply can't have this many issues with our payment system in production.
With that said, I'm curious if these are known problems currently with the sandbox API, and/or if the production API currently has the same reliability issues? I'd love to hear some honest feedback from other developers and their experience with the live API in this regard, so that I can hopefully continue moving forward with some peace of mind for myself as well as my client.
Thanks in advance.